OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques. Assembled here are a series of magazine-type articles on all aspects of big game hunting.

FOREWARD: Much controversy surrounds all aspects of hunting, and the tradition of campfire discussion continues in this website and chatroom. All subjects of interest to hunters are considered Fair Game, just like at an actual hunting camp.

[[ Brief preface. My name is Larry. When I was younger, if there had been a Ransom Machine Rest available in the neighborhood, fewer of my friends would have had me shoot their weapons to see what accuracy they were actually capable of. I won’t tell you how old I am, except that it simply means there’s a good chance I have at least heard of most things of importance. The day I stop learning new things, is the day I no longer exist in any real sense, which I hope won’t be for a while yet. I fully recognize that many of the new readers of a hunting series of articles, may have only heard of the 30-06, and may well know even less about hunting. For these intrepid explorers, I suggest reading some gun-oriented magazines, and Reloading Manuals tutorials, as weaponry is a fascinating hobby and always has been. More experienced hunters will want to check me for errors! I welcome parallel blogs and chat rooms, whether pro or con, using OldHunterRumors as a rallying or protest point. It’s all good for thought. I offer a readymade chatroom on the lead page.

This website and info outlet is a chance for me to enable and empower whomever might benefit, from various such things which probably took too long for me to figure out, without a source of cheat-notes like this. Enjoy! ]]

OldHunterRumors #1. The 30-06.

The largest single group of deer hunters are both trophy hunters, and armed with a 30-06 bolt action, usually bearing a fixed-power 4x scope. New hunters and well-connected experienced hunters are both told by their peer group, and shown by example, that this is “the” equipment to have. Even the bullet size is prescribed as a 180 grain spitzer hunting bullet (pointed softnose for mushroom-shaped expansion and hydrostatic energy transfer to the target, at extended range).

This particular combo will work just about anywhere, on any sort of presentation of the largest deer species which can be hunted worldwide. Plus, you get points for patriotism, as the 30-06 more or less won two world wars, and is somehow synonymous with apple pie. But if you shoot an apple with an ‘06, good luck recovering even a single seed. The ‘06 has power beyond easy visualization, being designed to drive a full metal jacketed (fmj) spitzer bullet through an earthen embankment and then through a steel helmet. Obviously, they worked pretty well for this, we won.

Back before there were lots of magnum rifles, and people selling them, the ‘06 took the largest Grizzly bears dependably, using 200 grain or so bullets, or even heavier if you could find them. Now either the bears are much tougher, or magnum sales were in a slump. Most data sources now claim the 30-06 will only make the big bears angry, and you must buy a magnum rifle for every direction. Lately, however, the 7.62 NATO/308 Winchester is normally used in Siberia against the world’s largest Brown bears, at somewhat less power than an ‘06, perhaps because no one told them they needed a magnum! They do use the bigger bullets for this, of course. One must always match the bullet to the intended game, and the total situation.

Truly if you need more power than a 30-06, you are up to something unusual. Like shooting a large and hard-kicking 300 Magnum across wide mountain canyons, hoping to minimize wind drift (sideways deflection). Also, antelope hunters on especially windy days on the wide open plains, can still go out effectively, using 300 Magnum power which can easily take the largest African game where legal, or a modest prarie beast bearing only 40 lbs. of meat. Well, it works, so it is often done. A surprising number of people are in this situation, but most hunters are a lot closer to the target. In most wooded areas, you can’t even see past 150 yards, usually less than that, and the trees reduce wind effects. The 30-06 has more than twice the power and range needed to reliably anchor the largest elk, if the hunter does their part with normal skill. The 30-06 has also been used to take the African Big 5, but some spectacular failures have been noted, as well. Don’t get reamed by a rhino!

The usual 180 grain softpointed spitzer bullet is intended to hang together very toughly, either at 300 Magnum high velocities, or to not expand very much, to not transfer a lot of kinetic energy to a target, when fired at ordinary 30-06 velocities. This works out conveniently and very well for ’06 trophy hunters who don’t care that a rump shot will send toxic gut juice throughout the meat of the deer, as the mostly unexpanded bullet penetrates all the way up to the vitals for the kill. The poorly presented rear shot at the trophy of a lifetime, doesn’t get away from an ‘06 / 180 grainer, if the hunter does their part! The meat can always be donated to charity, where they know to try to soak the gut juice out of it and use a lot of pepper and tomato, or to people who think that “gamey” taste is normal for venison. Since many deer out there are gutshot, I suppose in a way, the taste of bile and ruminant juices can in that way be considered semi-normal. If I screw up and hit too far back, into the intestines, I immediately hack the quarters off the torso, leaving the hide in place for convenience and speed, so those foul juices don’t have time to migrate into that pure mountain venison, which will taste just as good as butcher’s beef, with maybe a hint of sage from the deer’s diet. No gamey taste, when you do it right! You can arrange the rack so that it shows for all to see on the drive back, that you didn’t contribute to the hunter-failure statistics. Let the ice chests show as well, so they don’t think you wasted the carcass, which would be illegal.

So it is that the “very tough” 180 grain bullet in the ferociously powerful 30-06 works out very well, for trophy deer hunting, which is most deer hunting overall. But all that stout recoil generated in a stock 30-06 does not have to be endured, especially if you are bothered by it enough that it distracts your aim, which is true of many or most people, few of whom will admit it. You can switch ammo, or switch gun calibre for something more matching the size of the game. How many good broadside presentations suddenly became a gutshot animal, because someone was concentrating on overbracing for all that recoil, and it tweaked their aim? Many people, it seems, have had trouble from too much recoil from too much gun in the deer fields. There are a lot of options.

“Uncle’s” 270 Winchester deer rifle, basically a 30-06 necked down from .308” to accept .277” bullets, has more range and less recoil than an ‘06, and can take big elk, if you use the larger bullets on such larger game. “Cousin’s” 25-06 is the same thing, except necked to accept .257” bullets, for extreme long range and low recoil, and with the larger bullets in that calibre, can reliably take big mule deer! Virtually all 30-06’s can be easily converted to these two calibers by a qualified gunsmith, and many have been. Not that this should ever become a requirement. That would violate everyone’s Right to Privacy, which is danced around in our nation’s charter documents. The Right to Privacy needs to be better spelled out someday, before it gets too infringed in a permanent way, perhaps to be lost forever if infringement itself becomes an ongoing precedent, which appears to be already happening throughout the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence.

All the roaring recoil of their 30-06 is considered a feature of their manhood by many, and they would feel less of a man without it. The things many of them say about anyone who would neck down a “sacred” 30-06 are less than printable. Until someone mentions “grandpa’s” 30-30 at one third the power of an ‘06, and less kick than a 25-06, nestled in the 12x12 antlers of his whitetail trophy! Most of that sort of genetics has been hunted out by now. For some reason, it makes sense to us to kill the ones we want to sire the next herd. We do have to hunt just the right number of deer every year to replace lost predator function, or they would overrun our crops. Similarly to our hunter-gatherer predecessors, we must hunt or starve. Interesting how that works out. The 30-30 has always been accepted as plenty of gun for deer, at typical woods range, except by extremists waving their own phallic patriotism in gun form, the noble 30-06.

There is a “clandestine club” of reloaders, including myself, which when faced with using a borrowed or provided 30-06 on ordinary deer at normal woods range, well, we prepare ammo which performs nicely on deer and doesn’t generate huge unnecessary recoil to screw up our aim. The ammo externally looks like ordinary ammo, but uses a reduced powder charge on a lighter bullet. One of my favorite such loads for ordinary deer at ordinary woods distances, is to use the Hornady #3021 interlocked big game bullet at 130 grains in weight, over 45 grains of IMR-4064 powder, which is known for consistent results, in resized 30-06 cases, seated with the overall length of 3.170” to fit all standard guns. This makes a lot less recoil than the usual 30-06 load, and slightly less than a 270 Winchester. But at 2700 feet per second and 2100 ft-lbs of energy, this will anchor a big elk with good hits at reasonable range, and will certainly take any ordinary deer with a good shot placement centering the lungs, a large target. Remember, these are only deer, not Cape buffalo! Since it is a reduced load at standard external specs, there is nothing to worry about using it in any new or old 30-06 in good condition. When in doubt, check with a gunsmith, or on location, look for any signs of regular ammo showing trouble indications, on fired cases. With luck, you can already have your “sane” loads secretly made up, and simply use them without anyone catching on. Likely those who notice are already doing it quietly themselves! I mark mine with a spot of felt pen (not near the primer, where solvent fumes can reduce reliability!).

The tried, trusty, and true old 30-06 can be your good luck charm in Brown or Grizzly bear country, if you carry a few special cartridges already made up with 200 or 220 grain roundnose bullets at full power loadings, conveniently carried in a pocket, ready for quick substitution. Surprisingly, the big bears tend to overreact to most any bullet hit for a few moments, giving you time to make the ammo switch on at least one cartridge, which should be all you need, on a heart shot at 3 paces! The roundnose bullets tend to expand more reliably, have less deflection on obstructions like twigs or bones, and are shorter in length, than similar weight spitzers, which helps both twist-stabilization and powder capacity in the heavier weights such as these here which will penetrate deeply from high sectional density (weight per cross sectional area).

Since these will be full loads, one must observe all the cautions listed in any reloading manual, most notably, start low and work up a grain of powder at a time, carefully looking for any signs of excessive pressure in your specific weapon, such as flattened primers, changes in the case head stamp appearance, difficult extraction, or any other anomalies. Both the Hornady and Speer reloading manuals contain excellent tutorials on reloading. I personally feel one should read both, and compare the two viewpoints. Remember that top loads made on a cold day might be overloads when fired on a hot day.

With polished skill at reloading, and careful choices of components, many reloaders feel, and can often prove, that their reloads are better in ways than factory ammo. As factory loads get better every year, that is becoming debatable in specifics. But I remember when usually the only way to use your choice of premium bullets was to load them yourself. To an extent, that has changed. Anyway, reloads are certainly cheaper in most situations, allowing more practice, thus creating more shooting skill. Plus, many guns exhibit an accuracy or consistency preference for certain bullets, or exact levels of specific powders. There is only one way to discover what this preference might be. Someone has to try out the available options, spread out conveniently in your favorite reloading manual. This is still the Golden Age where preparation and savvy can put you ahead of the consumer-types. Good luck, see you out there!

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #002. Caught Between Hollywood and a Hard Place.

Remember The Rifleman TV series? Chuck Connors never looked better, as a modern (for then) day knight, defending noble values while wielding a fancy carbine, an upgrade of the gun that won the West (1873 Winchester), the1892 Winchester! The one copy I found on CD of an old Rifleman collection of 3 episodes, all had an 1892 big ring lever model with the hole in the barrel which looked 30 calibre or larger to me, seen in the CD stop action. It is definitely not a 25-20, which was also available in the Model 92. Early advertising suggested the use of the 25-20 on deer, but the often multiple hit requirement for such use was overly controversial, and such ads were quietly dropped. That many hits would surely place some in the intestines, with bile and other juices badly tainting the delicate venison.

But back to the gun, or rather that semi-fuzzy image which made it through all the years, just to fool me, it seems. You can win bets on this one. Show the picture to a shooter and ask them what calibre it looks like. The 1892 also came out in 32-20, and later in 35-20. The fuzziness makes the hole in the barrel look smaller, so a knowledgeable shooter will likely say one of those. But the original guns used in the series have survived, and recent checking has confirmed that they were chambered in 44-40, a very reliable “stopper“. On camera they shot the old 5 in 1 blanks. But the late Frank C. Barnes in Cartridges of the World, summed it all up saying, “It is said that it (the 44-40) has killed more game, large and small, and more people, good and bad, than any other commercial cartridge ever developed”. We’re talking very big shoes, here! The 44-40 was available in both rifle and revolver form, which simplified logistics for many satisfied users, needing only one box of cartridges from the general store, which contributed to it’s popularity. The safety in a war zone was another selling point, as was the hunting aspect, for a reliable food back-up system, independent of outside assistance in the wilderness. If you were worthy, chances are you did ok, with your 44-40’s. The even more powerful 45 Colt was only available in revolver form, until much later in history, but made it’s mark as well in winning the West, in the New Model Army sidearm.

In joyful fantasy, Connors was shown regularly shooting the guns out of the hands of dastards, much like the other celluloid heroes like the Lone Ranger and others. In reality, of course, there have only been a very few exhibition shooters who could regularly display such accuracy, and they were openly paranoid about proper safety at their shows, having seen the result of the Law Of Averages. But these were children’s shows, and censors were tighter back then about deathmongers and mayhemists being presented as role models before the leaders of tomorrow, so lethality was handled formulaicly. We see the results of the discontinuation of those policies, with youth being desensitized to actual carnage, to the point of their expecting it as a cure for boredom, fusing youthful fantasy and mayhem into acceptability on street corners in real life.

But real adult doings were involved in the development of that gun, and it touches on many relevant arenas, such as deer hunting, manhunting by other men, military firepower philosophy, the energy versus calibre debate, the wound versus kill the enemy choice of strategy, and more. The deeper you dig, the more relevant this quaint gun series becomes. But thanks to superb acting, it still retains it’s youthful savor, and suggestion of genuine values.

In 1873, Winchester made eighteen copies of a new rifle, the 1873 Model SRC, for Saddle Ring Carbine, in lever action. They were chambered in 44-40, a powerful cartridge then and now. It could reliably stop or kill a man at 100 yards or more very suddenly with a solid body hit. Or a big Mule deer or elk with broadside heart/lung area hits at reasonable range. As Winchester got around to making more of them, they became singularly known as “The gun that won the west”. It was not a buffalo gun, but got used on them anyway, as several hits would put down a good-sized bison from horseback fairly quickly, from 5 feet away, aiming for the thinner spot in the mantle of gristle and inch-thick skin, at the “armpit”. No doubt a memorable experience. The bullet-resistant hide thinned at the armpit, for a small but useable window to the vitals, by either bow and arrow, or a 44-40 class weapon. A regular buffalo gun like the 45-70, could pierce the hide anywhere you found convenient!

As a historical note, the original name of the 44-40 was 44 Winchester Center fire (44 WCF). Marlin chambered some guns in 44 WCF and was an instant laughingstock for printing the name Winchester on a Marlin rifle! They hurriedly changed the cartridge name to 44-40, and pressured everyone into listing it that way, or lose their dealership. Folks laughed themselves silly and complied. Even Winchester swung in on a good joke, and changed their listing as well! In truth, this kept the cartridge standardized, which was good for everyone, so there was an ulterior motive, as well.

But then in 1882, something strange happened. Many theories abound to explain exactly what was the thinking behind Winchester coming out with the esteemed 1873 SRC chambered in, of all things, 32-20! By comparison to the mighty 44-40 WCF, this was wimpy and nowhere.

A lot of people were lied to in the selling of the 32-20 part of the shipments from Winchester. It was “adequate” for defense against annoyed humans, but unlike the solid knockdown power of the 44-40, it required good hits. One theory had it that people had gotten spoiled by the “stoppers”, the 45 Colt handguns, and the 44-40 Winchesters whether in rifle or pistol form, and perhaps therefore they deserved to have to aim properly. The 32-20 could still kill deer with a proper close range heart/lung area broadside hit, and hit game would run for less than a quarter mile. Folks could make do, so now they were expected to, or so they may have found out suddenly, perhaps to their peril! Surprise!

On the other hand, word got around eventually to people what was what, and when many got over their shock and anger, did one of several things about it. Many simply rationalized that a gun which could kill, and do so at almost no recoil, was not such a bad deal. Anyone somewhat afraid of guns to begin with, now had their dream-weapon, and some say this was Winchester’s intention all along. Until they consider the release of the 25-20 in 1892 or so, essentially a necked-down 32-20, and clearly appropriate primarily for under 50 lb game. Some marketing personnel mentioned deer, briefly, and to their peril it may have been, from angry customers!

32-20 owners often found people who would go for less power, and sold their 32-20 SRC to them, applying the proceeds to the purchase of a more powerful gun. But someone’s imagination was stirred by those fast multiple hits one could have with a lever action, when they saw 32-20 hunters doing it out of necessity, “filling the air desperately with lead” at the departing image of a deer getting smaller.

The name “saddle ring” referred to a modest-sized ring mounted to the rear and left side of the rifle’s action, intended for use on the non-mount/dismount right side of the saddle, held on by a leather thong tied in a fast-release slip-knot. Sometimes low-tech is best, and this worked out fine. At some point, a desperately creative person arranged for his 1873 in 32-20 to have a big, round lever handle, to see if it improved the rate of fire. It didn’t, but the swing-around cocking style became possible. That is, if you had really long arms, to not risk shooting yourself in the armpit, which was a real possibility if you got distracted. Custom gunsmiths made a few of them for exhibition purposes.

Then the 1892 Models came out, with a big stylishly shaped ring lever standardly available. Yea, Winchester! And shortly thereafter, chambering in 25-20 was also available. Boo, Winchester! Putting all this together in the mid-20^th Century, an idea formed for a TV series, based on the “recoilless” ring levered SRC, which could be easily rapid-fired and spun-around cocked, that is if the cartridge didn‘t fall out while the gun was upside down. To prevent this from happening, the studio had a gunsmith install a spring-loaded piece which would hold the shell from falling. Also to actually improve rate of fire, a simple screw was mounted into the cocking lever just right to bump the trigger when the gun was nearly cocked. Yes, nearly! Yes, I know, it scares me too. The adjustment was so critical that a knurled retaining nut was installed on the screw to prevent the setting from changing even slightly. The cocking lever loop was enlarged to match the custom models that wild-eyed people had swung around a half-century earlier.

Long lanky Chuck Connors wound up with the television role, perhaps in hopes he wouldn’t singe his underarm hairs on company time. I personally think the strong vertical lines of his tall skinny form subconsciously suggested spiritual energies to the producers, so he was made to appear as a conservative semi-reformer, e.g. “good guy” by the script writers. Or perhaps someone saw his lantern jaw line as a beacon of goodness in a 4AM dream? Art imitates life, in most cases, but maybe simply it was nice folks on the creative team, and that’s the explanation. Also, Connors was already a modern-day hero, as he had been a center for the Boston Celtics, and played major league baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs! It’s the sort of thing you can never know for sure, how much of what had how much effect. Off the screen, he was a shooter with a big gun collection, with lots of friends.

What helped the rate of fire primarily, was the open trigger guard, as well as the screw kicker. Once cocked, the trigger was in little danger of being bumped, as it was shrouded by the cocking lever. So any similar cocking lever, ring or not, would have worked fine for rapid fire from the hip. While I have not done it myself, nor any other form of trick shooting, which I simply don’t feel is responsible behavior with lethal hardware, I have talked with people who have rapid-fired a ’92 with stock geometry. They tell me their rate-of-fire is not as fast as a screw-modified piece might be, and tends to hurt one’s finger. Universally, they all admit it is a temptation, but few want to have the teardrop shape made round on their 92. But for Hollywood, that big ring cocking lever was pure gold, even if it was made from some other metal.

Naturally new shooters hearing of some kind of saddle ring carbine often thought that the big lever ring was the ring being talked about, and many imagined it being hooked on the saddle horn. For a long time it was a good joke for some dealers to offer saddle cinch rings to tourists as souvenier gun parts! In fairness, those did turn out to be a good wild west paperweight.

Anyway, I’m betting the military use of 22 calibre M16’s in some way grew out of the daily scene of Chuck Connors rapidfiring his mighty 44-40 from the hip. That would be life-imitating-art-imitating-life. Or something like that. But remember it was the flap over the 32-20 WCF which started the whole rapid-fire saga, with multiple hits on deer often being necessary!

Let’s dig out the books and run the 32-20 ballistics numbers. First the pre-1892 black powder loads. We assume perhaps 100 grain bullets at 1500 feet per second (fps) as typical frontier doings. That’s about 500 ft-lbs of energy, like a snubby 357 Magnum right at it’s muzzle, using much lighter bullets with 30% smaller footprint on the target (cross-sectional area). Assuming a typical Ballistic Coefficient of 0.130 for flatnose bullets that size, used safely in tubular magazines, you can set the sights 3 inches high at 100 yards, and be 4 inches low at 150 yards. On deer-sized game in a fair-chase arena on broken ground, the 3 inches is largely moot. Out to 150 yards or so with this trajectory, one may simply aim and shoot. Or can you? At 150 yards, there is only about 230 ft-lbs of delivered energy remaining. This is not real good. A perfect hit on a modest sized deer might or might not result in a humane kill, with a short enough run to actually recover the beast. And perfection at 150 yards in a typical hunting situation, with iron sights yet, is expecting a lot.

We see 280 ft-lbs delivered at 100 yards. The lungs are a bigger target than the heart, and a centered lung shot with this much power on a modest-sized, perfectly presented deer might or might not do the job. That is, if you can hit that accurately at 100 yards in the 2 to 3 seconds you may have to do it in, once hunting season starts and the deer are spooked. Good luck getting as close as 100 yards for people not seasoned, crafty hunters. And using iron sights!

At 50 yards, we see 365 ft-lbs. This is handgun range, really, and if you miss with a rifle, don’t tell anyone! But even with this much energy, you still have to disable the heart or lungs on not bigger than a modest-sized deer, with a very accurate shot, for a reliable putdown. The conclusion so far is that the old black powder 32-20 loads left a lot of game in the field wounded.

In 1892, smokeless nitrocellulose-based powder changed everything! The new 32-20 factory loads were an 80 grain bullet at 2130 fps, for 806 ft-lbs of energy right at the muzzle. But wait, if we are talking regular-sized deer at hunting range out to 200 yards sometimes, we would need twice that much energy for humane kills with a light-weight 80 grain bullet. This much-improved-but-still-deficient energy on a smallish 80 grain bullet, well, that’s about good for perfect hits on modest-sized deer barely past the 50 yard limit we thought we just got rid of! Try and stretch that range, and you’ll still need good boots! I have no proof, but I “know” people loaded 100 grain bullets with smokeless powder at this time, ignoring the extra range numbers which meant nothing with the “bad joke” 80 grain bullets! I sure would have, if I were stuck with a 32-20, at that time. You usually can’t see past 150 yards in the deer woods, and the front iron sight can cover up the image of the deer at that range. There was no reason to go to the 80 grain bullet, except to talk about trajectory out to 200 yards you couldn’t use, as a nonsensical selling point for inexperienced hunters!

One can picture the frustration of someone used to their trusty 44-40 SRC, trying to get by with a 32-20 SRC on a big whitetail. Out of this anguish and other cascading factors, came…..The Rifleman! I guess what I liked best about the series was second, actually, to the rifle. It was that noble values were not only shown to be manly, but a source of personal strength. The world can use some more of that, these days.

Anyway, whenever we see the 1892 Winchester in an old Hollywood movie, or the 1873 Winchester once again winning the west, let’s remember the whole story. Such as it is, it’s our heritage.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #003. So What About the 243 Winchester?

It’s one of those calibers you see cartridges for in gas stations during hunting season in many areas, along with the 30-06, the 30-30, the 270 Winchester, and maybe one or two others. You tend to either love it or hate it, or some of both! The 243 Winchester.

Many 30-06 people often feel that anything other than an ‘06 is just plain wrong, unpatriotic, and the mark of a fool. The 270 people realize many of the 30-06 people think of them as some kind of traitors for necking down, by proxy, the 30-06 to use .277” diameter bullets. That, or at least unmanly. The 270’s range is somewhat better at somewhat less recoil, not such a bad deal. And the deer, or whatever, is a bit less of a mess from less overkill.

Both the 30-06 people and the 270 people realize that grandpa used his daddy’s old 30-30 saddle gun on deer just fine at the same average 75 to 100 yards distance most deer are taken at, enduring only 1/3 the recoil forces of an ‘06! They allow as how you can’t stretch the range with a 30-30 much past 150 yards, 200 yards with the new Hornady soft plastic pointed tips that don’t set off each other’s primers in the tubular magazine, but they always overlook the fact you seldom need that much range. They grudgingly allow people to still use the 30-30, as though they could stop them somehow. Their instant argument is “what if you see the trophy if a lifetime facing away from you? That 30-30 won’t have enough power to penetrate the entire length of a monster deer to the vitals up front.” Well, that might be your only chance, but “hunting” as a concept suggests you can pass up unworkable presentations, and try for a better situation of things. A hunter who is not willing to hunt, has issues within issues to deal with!

Oh yes, the 243! We indulge now in satire. It was bad enough that newer powders allowed the 7.62 NATO/ 308 Winchester to kick the 30-06 put of it’s position with the military, but someone first had evil berries for breakfast back in 1955, and then necked the 308 all the way down to 24 calibre, one notch above 22, the child’s toy! The Mattel version of 22 center fire two years later, the 223 Remington/ 5.56x45mm NATO, was a continuation of this madness in the M16. The ruination of the military loomed! Oh, the shame of it all! Did someone say the upstart new hero 308 was necked all the way down to .243”? How could that even work? Wouldn’t it burn out the barrel throats? Wouldn’t it be grossly inefficient? What could you hunt with it over 50 lbs? The 30-06 people were positively aghast at all this obvious nonsense! It was clearly a Communist plot! Enough already of the satire!

Back in the early part of the 20^th century, work with the 250 Savage showed first that 87 grain bullets weren’t that great on deer, even at 3000 feet per second (fps). But an ammo update by Western Cartridge Co. to 100 grains at 2800 fps worked just fine on the largest whitetails properly hit at reasonable range. The 87 grain load had 1738 ft-lbs of energy at the muzzle, and the100 grain load had 1741 ft-lbs, just about the same. A lot of people noticed this event. Some kind of line was being crossed, on bullet size and power level. That discussion continues to this day, with handgun hunters using modest ingots of lead starting at 150 grains and running to 3 times that weight, and enjoying often spectacular results, because adequate bullet size is the biggest single factor in lethality on protoplasmic targets. The 22 centerfire people used huge energy on tiny bullets to also get spectacular results. It’s a campfire topic which never even begins to wear thin, and never will.

The 243 Winchester can send 100 grain bullets out at 3000 fps in most top loads at about 2000 ft-lbs of energy. Right away things look better. We’re in! It will take the largest deer, by time-honored ballistics knowledge! And as for burning out the barrel throats, that hasn’t been a problem with modern steels. Usually the question of efficiency isn’t relevant. Powder is relatively cheap. It takes a stout charge to light up the 243 or any other high power cartridge. If noise is a problem in a particular area, there’s always the 30-30!

In truth, something must be mentioned. Twenty-five years ago, Remington indulged in widely providing often unreliable-expanding 100 grain loads for a Winchester cartridge, the 243. A lot of failures in the field had people lamenting that the 100’s wouldn’t expand, and the 80’s blew up on big game. Folks did one of three things. One contingent relegated the 243 to varmint-use only, as the 80 grain bullets performed reliably on coyotes and such. A second gaggle, declared the 243 to be a bad joke and things went downhill from there. A third noble warriors group rose to the need and handloaded reliable big game bullets, thus saving the day! I chose to use the 100 grain Nosler Partition boattail bullets, which completely cured the problem for my rifle. But the damage was done, for a long time. Recently Remington has decided to make peace and better 243 loads. Today, assuming you avoid the older stock, Remington 243 Winchester hunting loads are accurate, powerful, and as reliable as any other premium bullet demonstrates.

So now that we’re winning, let’s dig out the tables and see what the ballistics facts are on the 243 Winchester with a 100 grain bullet, one with a boat tail for best foot forward. Remember that with small bullets like in the 22 centerfires, you need huge energy to do the job with those 55 to 70 grain bullets they often use on deer where it is legal to do so? In 22 calibre hunting of deer, the minimum of 1000 ft-lbs delivered at the target is frequently used as the “humane kill” line, by most seasoned experts. That doesn’t directly apply to larger calibers, as less energy to bullet size ratio is needed for the same result, but let’s create a safety factor by also applying it to 24 calibre this time. Exactly how far away can the 243 deliver 1000 ft-lbs of energy, and therefore humanely kill a large deer properly hit, including our additional safety factor?

Oh my stars and garters! It’s out past 400 yards! The “dinky” and maligned little 243 deals death at twice the range most people can hit accurately with it at, under field conditions! Of course, one must use a rangefinder to compute the holdover at that range. And figure in wind drift sideways for that long of a shot. Oh forget it. That’s too far out there. Let’s earn the name “hunter” and get a lot closer! Surprise! The gun we laughed at is better than we are!

While it is true that expert hunters have taken elk with the 243, I have no plans of doing so. As it is, I load the 243 with the 100 grain Nosler Partition bullet for use on deer, and have never lost a deer putting one of those in the boiler room. They cost a few pennies more, but that is the cheapest expense of the hunt. I use IMR-4350 powder, now owned by Hodgden. A safe load of it in my equipment which doesn’t alter either casehead nor primer geometry, fills the case to the shoulder. I see this as a safety feature as I can tell at a glance if anything doesn‘t look right. Also it is impossible to double charge the case. Personally, I individually weigh every charge I shoot, and would never attempt to judge a charge by it’s position inside the case, viewed from the outside of a bottleneck situation.

I feel it is a mix of physics, physiology, and psychology, which makes people feel that the light recoil of the 243 is a readout on the power of the gun. Of course it is not, as the 243 is fairly powerful as we have shown. Simplified, a significantly large amount of force is absorbed by the flesh, sinews, and cartelege of our shoulder assemblies. Because the 243 is balanced dynamic-ergonomically to it’s actual use, and doesn’t generate much more power than is actually needed for the job, it only makes slightly more kick than is absorbed by the fleshy mount, and that is what we notice and judge as the power of the tool. So it is that the 243 Winchester fools us in a good way. Low recoil, does the job reliably, fine with me. We’ll take it! Let the blowhards bluster all they want. Bluster doesn’t fill the larder.

I don’t want to tread too heavily on the fact stout 30-06 style recoil greatly increases training requirements in most people trying to develop good accuracy. I wish to nearly ignore the percentage of people who will never shoot well because a 30-06 hurt them that first day, and they will yank the trigger forever because of it. I want to cover my ears when people promoting big magnum rifle sales don’t tell the public they probably will need 2 years to work up to shooting such a gun accurately, if indeed they can ever get that far, with their available time and energy to devote to the task. Oh well.

In summation, I feel that the 243 is so much more than an ideal first gun for beginning shooters, which it is. When I am considering rifle-hunting anything smaller than elk, I find I just can’t pass up the extra accuracy I get from the low recoil of the 243, and can’t help but feel a little smug at the awesome reliability of the Nosler Partition bullets I load, sometimes on site with a Lee Loader and piece of firewood for a mallet! Back at camp, I always keep some cheaper bullet loads, for the people who initially scoffed, but who will want to try a 243, after they see what it does on real game. Typically, you see surgery-type kills with a minimum of meat damage, more accuracy than most thought they were capable of with a serious hunting rifle from the low recoil, comfort to the point of actual fun, utter reliability when used with a premium bullet on good hits, and a sense of camaraderie with the scattered few who know about a very good thing.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #004. 357 Magnum deer hunting.

Already, I can hear the howls. Many if not most hunters freely assume that whatever they consider to be popular lore is actual tested fact. Many if not most established gunwriters must parrot accepted dogma to keep their jobs, and sometimes one catches them in that they haven’t even actually tried what they espouse or condemn, to have a valid opinion of it. This is especially true regarding the use of the 357 Magnum on ordinary deer.

I have no intention of “splitting the difference” between idiots and fools to form a printable and popular opinion, like so many seem to have done. In fairness, however, a lot of non-hunter “range rats” I have met, have endlessly studied the records and charts, and shot pretty much everything with a trigger, talked with seasoned rough-hewn veterans of every conceivable use of firearms there is, and they weighed it all to form some valuable opinions, which I now honor, as these people have helped me over the years. Still, I am naturally more of a doer than a talker, perhaps to my discredit in some circles. But lately a disabling injury has made me into a bit more of a talker. Be this as it may.

While I have not lately had the health to venture to field, and been busy with other duties, it was not so long ago that I did some actual 357 revolver deer hunting of ordinary deer and large Mule deer, with very good results. Right away this sets me apart from all those “experts” who haven’t been there and done that, but yet have the opinion that because someone with a 44 Magnum killed a deer, that it takes a 44 Magnum to kill a deer! Many gunwriters seem to fall into that group, as they try to get manufacturers to send them the latest 44 Magnums, or bigger, to test for their next article. Have fun, guys! Blast away! Consider double hearing protection.

Back before the supermagnum craze hit the handgunning world, folks remembered that then-Major Doug Wesson had many times used his invention, the 357 Magnum, with hardcast bullets on Grizley bears! The newer 44 Magnum then came out, with so much recoil that for most people then and now, it doesn’t matter what it can do, if they can’t hit well, with it’s power and recoil simply being over their controllability limit. The usual blustering over using 30-06 on deer with 3 to 1 overkill power and similar recoil, seemingly all has gotten transferred onto the 357/44 Mag deer hunt dichotomy. The fact that the 357 is the most powerful gun that most people can learn to control well, and can do the job just fine, doesn’t seem to make any difference!

I personally find that my 44 Mag T/C barrel makes way more power than I can justify putting up with, except on the big bears, and experience has taught me that 750 to 800 ft-lbs of energy is all a meat hunter needs on even large deer at 44 calibre, with medium weight bullets, not even the big ones at 300 grains or more intended for hogs and bears. So I handload it to that midrange power level, which by happy coincidence is both comfortable and accurate in my hands, using the rubber grip. Full loads in the 357 are about 600 ft-lbs of energy, also with the medium weight bullets, usually 158 grain JHP‘s, which with the rubber grip, are also both comfortable and accurate in my hands. I am the size and build of a linebacker, who has shot lots of Supermagnum handgun loads which made my shoulders and elbows hurt for days. When someone like me says moderate recoil is much more accurate, I hope someone else listens. In general, if what a person is shooting is not fun to shoot from too much steam, chances are they won’t be as accurate as hunting live targets ethically requires. Especially when a comfortable level of steam was enough to do the job reliably. The exception to this is where a person is going after outrageous game of some sort, and is willing to put up with extreme recoil and the extra training it will take to learn to hit accurately with it. The trick of practicing with lighter loads than one will hunt with has backfired on me, because I know I will need to overbrace for the heavy load in the hunting fields, which cuts into my 3 second window of opportunity to get settled, aim well, and squeeze the trigger properly. It is well worth my while to arrange an adequate power situation which will do the job comfortably. Excess power is simply a bad idea.

The “comfortable and accurate” recurring theme here is no coincidence. The two go together. It is possible through long and arduous training to develop accuracy with a weapon which is not comfortable to shoot. But the huge training requirement accompanied by unnecessary punishment every step of the way to do good work, leads to the kind of blustering neuroses we see, where there could have been people doing good work much sooner, and having a better time of it, at more reasonable power levels. This is equally true of long and short guns. As a side note, semi-auto actions tend to eat up more than half the felt recoil by spreading out the shock pulse in time. This move can enable someone to use a larger weapon for a specific application, they otherwise might have had too long of a training period to get used to, assuming they ever could have mastered it, given their finite available time and energy to devote to it.

As several 180 grain bullets in .357” diameter became available in recent years, the bluster machine swung into full steam behind them. Gunwriters who had clearly never seen what a standard heavy 357 Mag load of 158 grain bullets does to a Mule deer, all declared in unison that it now takes one of the new 180 grain bullets to kill a deer with a 357.

On one big mule deer I had hit a little high, my 158 grain JHP bullet from a 4 inch barrel service-type revolver, smashed it’s way through 2 shoulder blades, 2 ribs, the bottom of the spine, and almost made it out through the opposite hide. Both lungs were bloodshot from the fully expanded bullet. But with the spine hit, that 275 lb buck dropped like it had been hit by lightning! Knowing that thusly hit game can sometimes rise and stagger away given time to get it together, I dashed over and put an insurance shot in the neck, lined up on the hairline. That shut off breathing, and sensations of body pain, not a bad way to go. But smashing 5 bones at enough velocity to bloodshoot the lungs, well, you can’t tell me I needed more penetration from a heavier bullet, which would have been slower, with less shock capability, and more recoil for the shooter to have to put up with, from a 180 grain bullet. The 180 probably would not have been moving fast enough from a service revolver to either expand well, or have enough shock capability to bloodshoot the lungs.

Conversely, if there had been any brush busting to do, or if a succulent sow had wandered through, a 180 grain bullet would have added to hunter confidence, if not larder results! Let’s be fair about this! Also, when using a T/C 357 Magnum barrel, a closed breech situation good for an additional 300 fps or so, and the intended customer is an elk, the 180 grain bullets would be the appropriate choice, and I would feel undergunned without the use of them. All this has developed into a situation of one man’s appropriate technology properly applied where prudent, is another man’s opportunity to bluster nonsensically. Frankly, beer and guts being what they are, this situation will never change, and perhaps the wisest path is to view this sort of thing as a quaint feature of the human species, and not be bothered by it. Perhaps the differences aren’t as important as the agreements. Agree to disagree around the campfire, and it burns brighter. Either bullet probably would have been ok, but not everyone’s vision of optimum, especially approaching the extremes of the situation.

It turns out from an examination of the actual ballistics tables, that using iron sights on any 357 Magnum situation, even including the T/C systems, with their inherently slightly longer sight radius, you run out of sighting ability at range before you run out of power or trajectory. Not by a whole lot, because the 357 is not a long range calibre, even with spitzer bullets in the single shot guns, but it happens to a significant degree. The addition of a good 3X scope will usually turn a 50 yard reliable hit weapon into a 100 yard plus weapon, which uses the full power/trajectory range of a 357 revolver on modest-sized deer, assuming good hits.

Good luck finding a 3X long-eye-relief pistol scope. They usually go from 2.5X straight to 4X magnification power. I use a variable 2.5-8X variable to get my ideal 3X, and should my tastes change, the knob is handy! I have also a 4X scope for longer range shots at certain locations, but I have yet to use it, because if a closer shot is suddenly offered, I know I would have trouble getting a quick sight picture. I do use a non-magnification red dot sight on my 45 Colt T/C barrel, for up-close use at twilight in brushy areas, loading big bullets because often you can’t see minor brush in the shadows of big trees during the very best time to hunt, and brush-busting necessity can make a big difference! I use the T/C loads in the 45 Colt, set at about 750 to 800 ft-lbs, which I find to be comfortable and accurate in my hands, also with the rubber grip to reduce distraction. Concentration is everything in hunting, and all distractions cost you.

I have never needed the penetration of the JSP bullets in 357 Magnum. The hollow points do just fine on deer-sized game, at revolver velocities. But if I got a T/C barrel in 357, the JHP’s would blow up and not penetrate at the higher velocity of both a longer barrel and the sealed breech chamber design. On a revolver, the cylinder-barrel flash gap lets a bit of hot gasses escape, and there is less pressure to scoot the bullet along. So T/C velocities are usually about 300 feet per second faster than comparable Magnum revolver ordnance. Thompson / Center has a good thing going for us, as do other makers of single-shot hunting and target pistols. The single-shot Target/Hunting format has little military or gang potential and is obviously sportsman-oriented, so wholesomeness is included in the already reasonable prices, along with a nod from gun-control moderates, and anyone else who recognizes a proper “Olympics-looking” target pistol when they see it!

More 357 Magnum stuff is sold these days than is 38 Special stuff. Police departments used to be the largest users of 38 Special, but they have mostly switched over to either 9mm Parabellum, or the new 40 S&W semi-auto. (I am horrified that our police and military are cursed with “jam-o-matics” which tend to stackpole jam when firing around left cover.) It seems most of what is keeping the 38 Special going is the fact they will chamber and fire in a 357 gun, the only external difference being the 38 case is a little shorter. Generally, accuracy and power are not any different than when fired in a regular 38 Special gun, except that the Magnum is usually heavier and made to tighter specs from better materials, none of which hurts. People often practice, or plink at cans, loading 38’s in their 357. At one third the recoil, the fun factor is enhanced by an increase in accuracy in the shooter’s hands. Often ladies with small delicate hands find their very best locked-nightstand by the bed gun, is to load 38 Special +P’s into the stable heavier weight of a 357 Magnum revolver in double action design, to simply grab and pull the trigger. The ring of crud which can build up in the cylinder ahead of the 38 Special case in a 357 cylinder, easily cleans out or contributes to 38 accuracy if left in place. Chambering 357 ammo pushes the crud out, in my experience, so there is no particular problem, especially for those of us who actually clean our tools.

Most people can, and I think should sometimes, shoot a well set up 357 Magnum, safely at a range or in actual hunting. It is both our fulfillment, and our heritage. You might wish to shoot midrange loads to get to your personal comfort level, or 38 Special +P or +P+ loads work fine too, or regular 38 Special level “low penetration defense loads” intended to not penetrate house walls to endanger neighbors. For deer hunting, use full power 158 grain JHP’s, however. Center the lungs, broadside only, 50 yards maximum range for service-type revolvers, unless they are scoped.

In closing, I wish to say three things. First, judge the bite of the 357 Magnum with a rubber grip on it. Without the rubber grip, even my big athletic hands find them not that much fun, unless we are talking the single-action design, which rolls in the hand rather than biting it. But with the rubber grip, in my hands they are back across the fun line. Perhaps you will agree that this also means more accuracy in your hands as well.

Secondly, a great many people with large gun collections, say if they could only keep one gun, it would be their favorite 357 revolver. At any rate, you can’t go wrong in most cases, choosing a quality brand 357 Magnum service-type double-action revolver in a barrel length you feel comfortable with, usually around 2, 4, or 6 inches. The 2” is more concealable if you take the class and get the permit. The 4” is better sitting down with a holster belt on. The 6” is better for hunting with a bit more power and longer sight radius. A 7 1/2” single action is probably best just for hunting, but is also especially welcome at Cowboy Action Shooting events, using 700 fps reduced load lead bullets, for semi-authenticity. Check out the period clothing! A good time is had by all at these get-togethers, whether you shoot or not.

Third, the association of like-interested folks is the better part of any endeavor. May I suggest Handgun Hunters International, where I am member #7901. For experienced hunters looking for a challenge, or any hunter looking for something new, or like in my case, seeking the association of similarly involved people, HHI tops the handgun hunter list. Maybe see you on one of the various inexpensive group safaris, both near and far. Write to HHI, P.O.Box 357, Bloomingdale, OH 43910. The bi-monthly newsletter is mostly stories and photos from the members themselves. Take a camera next time you go hunting. Share with everyone our sport, in a format you yourself can review from the rest home someday, there and doing it, with the story told the exact way you want it to be, complete with your campfire opinions. But look out, many of these people and their suppliers have developed specialized hardware it might take a bit of getting used to seeing. They can show you specialty handguns for long range hunting, such as the 6.5 JDJ, which with 100 grain Nosler Partition bullets and a muzzle brake, can take any game you and a friend can lift into a Jeep, past 300 yards distance, at moderate recoil! Details at SSK Industries.com Hunting with a handgun does take some specialized training, and HHI members are always ready to welcome new people, regardless of which handgun they choose to hunt with, as long as it works ok in the real world, on real game, and is demonstratably properly humane.

Regards.

.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #005. The Drift On Troublefree Hunting.

First, let me apologize for getting carried away on the catchy titles. That’s probably not going to change, though. In this case, wind drift involves both bullets and scents. The two of them are related just enough to be combined into one article.

There is no way to completely disguise a human’s scent so that deer species won’t be spooked by it. Skunk scent tends to confuse the issue to some degree, which may be helpful. As do other scents as well, particularly deer gland scents if properly prepared and not cut with 99.999% snake oil. Better yet, one may arrange to not need a “scent screen”, also the name of a product, because they don’t actually specifically exist. There is no 100% effective screen for scent, especially considering a deer’s nose is thousands of times better than a human’s. If a scent reaches them, they will know all about it.

When hunting, the wind can be your best friend or worst enemy. A gentle steady wind to define scent drift direction, and keep the flies from biting your face and hands, can be a very good thing. Many times I have chosen where and which month to hunt by fly population, and when exactly to hunt by wind characteristics, which involve both scent and flies. Especially since a strong enough application of DEET to significantly help against some insects, will more or less put you to sleep, and you’ll miss things. Plus, you may not remember the hunt! The realization of comfort, in which to do our best work, is usually the result of planning by someone. Anyone can be that someone.

A switch-around breeze can mess up your day good. The deer know you are near, even if they don’t know exactly where you are. They will either melt into the ground cover shrubs until you accidentally step on one, or they may melt into the next county! But this is an opportunity to hunt with your old brush-buster, which might be a 45-70, or even that cut down 8mm Mauser with the really big roundnose bullet. Kicking up deer out of the brush, you may need to shoot through some of it, perhaps on followup shots. So the worst wind conditions can result in the most fun hunt ever, and you can use a gun which isn’t your most accurate one for it! Just don’t be too startled kicking up deer out of the brush and make errors.

To meaningfully guess at wind deflection of your bullet‘s path, you need to know the wind direction and average velocity not so much where you are, but over most of the distance between yourself and the target. Grasses and trees moving are a good clue, and that laser rangefinder can help determine at a glance both your holdover and wind deflection correction. Your wind drift can easily be more than your holdover! That’s enough to turn a sure thing into a very faint blood trail in the worst brambles you can possibly imagine. But it won’t, because you used the OldHunterRumors method.

It’s easy and quick. And based on common sense. The average distance where you will find yourself worrying about wind drift is 300 yards. Closer than that it isn’t a big deal, and much farther away, you shouldn’t be shooting in a big wind at live game. The average ballistic coefficient of common big game bullets is about 0.400. The average muzzle velocity of most deer rifles in use is about 2700 feet per second. The average crosswind which is bad enough to cause you to worry about wind drift is about 30 miles per hour. If the wind is exactly 90 degrees from the bullet’s path, the chart says that is almost 19 inches of wind deflection. Angling winds, and any of the other factors being somewhat different, will alter the precise result, but ”guessing at the wind” means precision is not what this is all about. We know this typical case is about 1 ½ feet of windage, and that’s a good thing to know for a quick seat-of-the-pants guess. This here old hunter knows better than to get bogged down by details! Of course I encourage everyone to use this thinking with specifics concerning their own situation du jour plugged in, to get a better take on things.

It is disturbing how easy it is to sabotage oneself regarding scents, when about to go deer hunting. It should be at least 3 days, and better a week, since the last use of aftershave. Start using only rubbing alcohol several days before the hunt, and plain water is better. The same goes for use of soap, which usually injures the skin to cause most BO in the first place. Beware anything which creates a need for itself. I use peroxide on my pits, and generally use plain water everywhere else, even when I’m not hunting, just because it works better, and leaves no residue. Even that unscented deodorant I use in town, is verboten in the deer woods, because it contains a “masking scent”, guaranteed to drive deer into conniptions, unless that is what you want, perhaps on a last day deer drive. Keep it in a freezer thickness ziplock until then, as scents wander through the air and stick to most surfaces. Ask any hound handler.

That fresh mountain scent in your laundry detergent might just evoke nightmare visions of pure terror to the tender nose of some innocent forest animal, as it is likely a coal tar component treated with a cocktail of fearsome poisons wisping menacingly forth. Small wonder so many people do better with unscented products these days. That gun solvent I learned to love as a child, seeing manly men heroically use it on those symbols of courage and power, the deer rifles, well, the deer don’t perceive it quite that way. To them it’s the smell of hunting season.

You can catch more fish “sometimes“, by spraying down your bait with lots of WD-40, so some people want to do it, and pollute a waterway. Because of that, it is illegal in many places, because it pollutes a waterway. But in hunting, this industrial perfumed cleaner-lubricant has found a new use, and chemicals suddenly no longer work against us. A week before a hunt, I and many others, scrub down all our ordnance iron with the stuff to get rid of other smells. If minute traces of the WD remain, I did give it a week to air out, so it’s not my fault! After a week, the human nose of a Game Warden is incapable of smelling enough of it to legally justify a “baiting” ticket. If asked how recently one might have used WD, we know to not have a definite answer, to avoid playing some idiot’s word games, which they think are a form of justice. If you can’t smell it, it’s not legally baiting. How sure are you exactly what day it was when you last cleaned your gun? Did you use WD for final oil, or something else? Wasn’t it month before last sometime? The option is for everyone who ever used WD-40 on a gun to be jailed unless some bureaucrat “likes” them. I say not in my America. Hey, you there with the apple in your pocket!

There is most always some wind, except when there isn’t. When it seems there is no wind, half the time there actually is, but it is sub-perception velocity. We mostly perceive wind of low velocity with our ears and neck hairs. When wind drops below perception threshold, but still is actually moving a little, all the things wind can do for you, or against you, are still happening. Smokers often make the mistake of lighting up to see where the smoke goes. If any burning fumes are perceived by a deer, it may well believe the woods are on fire, with predictable results, and some guy a mile away may be offered a running shot!

Some hunters, if they remember to, carry a packet of common dust to sprinkle a bit to the air and see if it moves laterally. Of course, in dry weather which can happen in deer season, one can just kick up a little dust to see what’s up. I personally, just move about, just enough to perceive air movement with my ears and neck hair. Usually I can notice which direction it takes less movement into, to perceive air movement. That is the direction which the air is coming from. I tell myself this is less conspicuous than stomping or lighting a fire, since I usually forget the little dust packet.

Don’t let your scent blow onto a big deer trail from the side, even from a moderate distance away, or all the deer may relocate for the next few months. When you have to cross a deer trail, keep moving right along, and don’t even consider touching the ground with even a gloved hand near the trail. Try to visualize the entire countryside the way the deer smell it, with all the drifting smells accounted for, in a habitat map of sorts. Add in the feeding areas, bedding areas, daytime layup areas, the routes used at the different times of day, and the drifting scents through it all that particular day. The successful hunters usually play it this way. You must evaluate the total situation, to arrange a meeting!

In conclusion, there are all kinds of drifts in the world to worry about. We develop our warrior-hunting skills to find utility in many causes, much like one single steel spike piercing the many different layers of a plywood board. Noble values such as freedom and respect for the rights to privacy and opportunity of us all, spring forth from the hunt for universal justice. These instincts are honed in the hunting fields, as our lives become an art form of completeness and skill, in the most real of worlds. The Universal Hunt.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #006. Big Bore Handgun Hunting.

Now that the 500 S&W Magnum has made it clear that dinosaur-smashing power and risk of deafness from one single unprotected shot indoors, is not the answer to everything, well, there are several conclusions.

All these conclusions have a central theme, that appropriate technology is better for the specific job than inappropriate technology. A 600 Nitro will kill a field mouse, and surely by now someone has done it, but the trophy no doubt was damaged. Imagine a taxidermist being presented with a single mouse claw and request for a head and shoulders mount! Or a meat hunter dashing forth with an empty jar to capture some of the pink mist? OK, that one overdid the point.

Ah the good old days! Back when I had the youth and braun to be the most outrageous gun recoil addict on the mountain! My Siamese Mauser 45-70, with 500 grain loads to near-maximum psi, saw a lot of use! But time, arthritis from motorcycle wrecks and such, and a sneak-attack calcium deficiency, all conspired against me to put an end to that. Hopefully, we caught it in time, and calcium (with vitamin D to get it so soak in) supplements have saved some of my shooting ability, if I stay below the stress-cracks-in-the-hands level of recoil. Older shooters, be warned by that, and take your calcium! Geriatric stress cracks take a longer time to heal than you may have left. Your hunting days could be over with both a bang and a whimper. Perhaps you know someone who needs to be told about this.

Be all that as it may, what now remains for me is perhaps a more sane attitude toward how much power behind that bullet is the actual maximization toward total results. More power to compensate for bad hits we would not have made with less need to overbrace for that much power which screwed up our aim in a brief offered hunting shot, well, we see where that one is going.

Conversely, limiting the run distance of hit game by upping the power, often appeals to older hunters. We all tend to pay an increasing price for each additional step in rough country, with each passing year, following blood trails through slash piles and brambles, and then packing out hundreds of pounds of meat through the same terrain. But usually, the older shooters will have enough savvy to more or less balance the gun to the game within certain excess limits. Those who don’t, sometimes quietly quit hunting for some reason.

My use of 44 Magnum midrange loads is a good example of appropriate technology for deer hunting. I find that a level of power around 750 to 800 ft-lbs is plenty at .429” bore for even the largest deer. That’s 1200 fps on a 240 grain JHP, or 1300 fps on a 200 grain JHP, both with plus or minus 3” flat hunting trajectory out to about 110 yards with dead-on sighting. For elk, of course use full loads, but deer are half the size of elk. Generally, only a charged up deer will get more than a few feet, hit well with one of these. The 200’s are refreshingly more fun to shoot, unless the kick is what you’re after. Less recoil usually means more accuracy in my hands, and likewise for most target shooters who win.

I will limit my rant concerning those gun writers who for various reasons find themselves saying you need full 44 Magnum loads to hunt deer. You do not. Clearly people paid for print are pressured to say things which make money for their sponsors, which now involve many much larger handguns than the 44 Mag. The truth of the matter is that most people who buy 44 Magnum handguns either shoot midrange loads or none at all. Smart manufacturers are currently offering such factory midrange loads, and they far outsell the hand-biters. I know people who take some full loads to the range, not to shoot but to let others shoot, who want to experience the assault!

Yes, it’s true, my own wildcat in 44 calibre, with full loading has twice the power and recoil of a 44 Magnum, but let me explain. I wanted a cartridge with a lot of taper, a big rim, and adequate size to be handled in sub-freezing weather by numb fingers, without taking eyes off the target, in a T/C Contender format. I only load it to the 750 to 800 ft-lbs energy as just described, because so far I have only hunted deer with it. I cut a 7.62X54R cartridge to 1.480” trim length, and neck reamed at .4275” to seat standard 44 calibre bullets. I have a chamber reamer to rechamber ordinary 44 Magnum T/C barrels, for my 43 Winter Special, which is truth in calibre since the standard 44 bullets measure .429” to .430”. It has plenty of taper, but not too much to cause excessive bolt thrust, and no shoulder at all to hang up on, all for a Rapid Chambering characteristic. A standard 7.62X54R sizing die works fine. Jury-rig seating and crimping dies from standard hardware ground off any way you want to, with a 44 calibre nose punch. Fired cases can be sent to a die shop for classy dies to be made. Finally, those freezing Russians know what size to make a rim, for good handling with numb fingers! I left the big rim stock, over the objections that people said it didn’t look like their gun stuff, and I should be like them.

The cut-off length of 1.480” was derived to produce a modern case mouth thickness, with no additional steps needed. The .4275” reamer produces a proper interference bullet fit without bulging the case. There is already more case capacity than can be utilized in a purist 10” handgun barrel, and any more would result in erratic ignition with today’s powders, unless a longer barrel is used. For that, the 444 already exists. So there is no reason to change, and nothing to be gained by altering these derived dimensions. Nothing was chosen, as the case designed itself. Changing anything will screw something up, for its intended use. Even making a long freebore to seat the bullets out farther to increase powder capacity when using larger bullets which would have extended into the case, reducing it’s capacity, that is already moot since the case is already as big as you can get away with in a purist 10 inch barrel. More powder than this doesn’t increase velocity, and causes vertical stringing from unstable ignition. The 43 Winter Special is already optimized, let’s just enjoy it! Use standard 3/32 inch leade. It is obvious that the Russian designers of the 7.62x54R had all this in mind, for use with the Russian 44 Cal bullets, back in 1891, using rifle powder put through a coffee grinder to increase burning speed, and all plans were washed away by political events. Be all this as it may. It’s ours now! The best of Winter hunting! I say the 30 Cal rifle cartridge was an outgrowth and vehicle for the now-named 43 Winter Special, bootlegged under the Czar’s nose! Hunters will do whatever it takes to get set up right, and they tricked the Czar into paying for it!

I wish anyone who wants to use this wildcat to do so, if they keep the 43 Winter Special name on it, and use the specific dimensions I have described, so things don’t get screwed up. By the way, the modern brass is thick enough on this 52,000 psi cartridge, that you must ream the necks. It’s not like the thin 30-30 brass where some decided to not ream and screwed up Mr. Herret, by creating two versions of the 357 Herret cartridge. When you ream these modern thick and uneven body brass made into necks, you will see that about one in three needed it for the bullet to even point down the bore correctly, and that the unreamed brass would have been thick enough to cause chambering problems. Forester can set you up with a ream jig, but call them up and tell them what you are up to, as you will need a custom collet (shell grip piece) for that size rim.

In closing on the subject of my own wildcat, there are two points I wish to make. First, if the 44 Magnum had .020” or more taper, I wouldn’t have had to create the 43 Winter Special. But since the 44 pistol series are straight cases intended for revolver use, in winter T/C service, with cold, numb fingers and not taking eyes off the hit game, that perfect indexing requirement for chambering means some of them will likely be lost in the deep snow amid colorful language, even with slight chamber mouth rounding and polishing! Because there was no ready solution to the problem, I was forced to make the 43 Winter Special for my own use. I avoided naming it after myself to encourage others to use it.

The 44-40 was tempting, but was designed for very low brass expense, and lower pressures than I needed for both the 750 to 800 ft-lb power lever, and reload ability. That much power makes the 44-40 case a single-use throwaway. So now a cartridge exists for sub-freezing single shot pistol (SSP) use on big game in purist 10 inch barrels at T/C Contender (or Encore) pressures, with an optimized Rapid Chambering characteristic. I needed it, there wasn’t one, so I made one. Even so, it helps to round and polish the T/C’s chamber mouth a bit, to maximize Rapid Chambering, especially standing in deep snow, where you will not find fumbled cartridges any time soon!

Secondly, I see the way people’s eyes light up at the prospect of twice the potential power of a 44 Mag, if the 43 Winter Special is chambered in an Encore action and loaded that high, to 52,000 psi or better, which the brass is meant for in modern manufacture. According to data, a 300 grain or larger FMJ (or homemade jacketed hardcast bullet) can be launched from the 43 Winter Special at adequate velocity to take any game on the planet with a 10 inch sporting single shot handgun, with good hits and at reasonable range. Please believe me, this was not my original intention, and I can already see someone getting reamed by a rhino and blaming it all on me! For such white-knuckled use, I suggest the 375 JDJ, which will let you get back a little farther away! Me, I’m just after medium-sized management bucks with defectively undersize antler genetics, at 750 to 800 ft-lbs of snort. I want the best of breed to breed. And not gather dust and anti-hunters on some wall.

For years, I wanted the big gunmakers to come out with a big 50 calibre magnum revolver, so I could download it to my own specs, and the extra weight would help in pointing, and soak up recoil. Smith and Wesson greeted the new millennium with such a beast. And beast it is! I flatly refuse to shoot a full load in one, at my age. Of course, a meat deer hunter like myself will want only about 800 ft-lbs of energy to have to deal with. You can make “light” 340 grain bullets in 50 calibre, using the RCBS handgun bullet mold, which at 1025 feet per second (fps), makes 793 ft-lbs. Without a lot of jockeying around, you can see right away that long range would cost us in kick, with this weapon. The bullet is described as a semiwadcutter, but it looks to me like a round flatnose. In any case, it is so darn big, it doesn’t need to expand on game, and that flatnose part is big enough to transfer enough hydrostatic shock to sweeten the deal.

The majority of deer taken whether with rifle or pistol, are hit at less than 100 yards, with 75 yards as an average figure, nationwide. This load we just described has sufficient ballistics to do exactly that, with no need for holdover sight corrections. Sighted in 3” high at 50 yards, it will hit about 3” low at 100 yards. Energy at 75 yards is 610 ft-lbs, more than a 357 Magnum right at it’s muzzle! Stick that in a deer’s ribs at 50 calibre and 340 grains in weight, and there’s your winter’s venison.

The new Hodgdon 2007 Reloading manual shows a very reduced load for a slightly heavier 370 grain gas-checked bullet, using their new Trail Boss powder intended for “large case reduced load” uses like this. They quote 12.0 grains of powder making 926 fps and 19,000psi. Experience has shown me that reducing bullet weight about this much, from 370 grains down to 340 grains, will result in a bit less pressure, and a bit more velocity. I would expect about it to come out right about where we want. Lowering bullet weight modestly is considered safe, as it lowers pressures. Also, switching to a non-gas checked bullet might lower pressures even more. The 500 S&W is rated at 60,000 psi, so we are quite safe. And Trail Boss powder is a fast powder intended for reduced loads like this

DO NOT reduce powder loads with any slower Magnum powder like WW 296, or any of the 110‘s, which require high pressures to properly ignite! Only the faster, non-magnum powders can be safely reduced from published specs on powder charges, and then not a whole lot, as you can get a bullet stuck in the bore and remove your knuckles on the next shot! We are slightly reducing bullet weight, in this instance, which does reduce pressures without the worry of a bullet stuck in the bore, and therefore we must stay with non-magnum faster powders at lower pressures, to use this technique. Yet another possible pitfall worth mentioning, is the mistaken substitution of a cupro-nickel jacketed bullet where a powder charge is specified for a lead alloy bullet. Not only does this increase pressures which can damage certain ordinary guns, but there is the possibility of sticking the tough jacketed bullet in the bore with disastrous results on the next shot, as described. Always, when there is a pop instead of a boom, with lessened recoil, check for a stuck bullet, before shooting again, even if you are in the middle of a contest of some kind at the time. Safety first! Folks will understand! No contest is worth firing on a stuck bullet, and then picking pieces of your gun out of that tree over there, or the occasional bystander!

Because all these 500 S&W’s come with awesome muzzle brakes, between the brakes and the heavier weight of the gun, both reducing felt recoil, we may well find that we can shoot in comfort at somewhat higher velocities and power levels. There are harder rifle-type alloys to cast the 340 grain bullet out of, and it doesn’t need to be any heavier (!), so the higher loads using other powders might come into play. The universal rule in all handloading is start low and work up! The 370 grain bullet listings are a safe guide for using the somewhat lighter 340 grain bullets, which aren’t listed by the Trailboss manufacturer. Generally speaking, you’ll see around 8 % higher velocity, and similar decrease in pressure. Never substitute in a heavier bullet for any powder listing intended for a lighter bullet! That’s not safe, and in a maximum load, is guaranteed to create over-pressure. Of course most of us already know that. Once again, the lighter bullet is safe on the same powder charge, not the heavier one.

Most of the revolver hunters will want something a bit smaller than the 50 calibre. For a long time the military and many others have investigated the smokeless powder based pistol use in human hands on average 200 lb protoplasmic targets. It seems the peak of effectiveness lies somewhere around 43 to 45 calibre, all things considered. It also depends on how much weight you assign certain factors, but Elmer Keith and I agreed immediately, the top of the bell curve was broadly between 43 and 45 calibre. The 43 offers slightly better range and penetration, and where those are not paramount, the 45 offers better stopping power up closer. In the deer fields I have always used either, as the peak is broad enough I never felt compromised, and Elmer voiced swift agreement in his similar experience.

But lately with all these big boomers, with muzzle brakes built in, despite increased risk to hearing, the picture has shifted slightly, if you consider muzzle braked weapons legit. That would put the peak of effectiveness in human hands right on 45 calibre or even slightly bigger, where there are no examples. The new 460 S&W is still 45 calibre, and while it is a straight pistol case in a revolver, it’s rifle-like power and trajectory almost create a class of it’s own. I envision several wildcat possibilities, which I’ll probably not get around to making, since I don’t need one. The next up is 480, certainly stout even in its midrange forms. All of which grovels begging the question, other than for protection from nervy brown bears now terrorizing Alaskan town dumpsters and parked cars, what exactly are all these ultra boomers for, other than downloading to hunt deer? Yes, I know, that’s exactly what I wanted, but the bluster machine tells everyone else they have to use them at full power on deer hunts! People shoot them two or three shots at the range, quietly put them back in the box forever, and look for arthritis pills salts at the pharmacy!

I prefer strong modern actions in 45 Colt and load up the 750-800 ft-lbs I have a use for in the deer woods, but I have always been ready to download a 454 Casull to that same power level.

The bragging rights to having a 454 would fizzle if folks found out what I was up to. And the same for the 480’s or 50’s. I reject the brainwashing, because I handload, and use appropriate technology on a given job. I use Alliant Blue Dot powder for many of my midrange downloads, and enjoy cleaner burning propellant than most everyone else. Light loads often don’t seal the case against the chamber walls especially tight, and a bit of soot can get loose, so I use newer clean-burning Blue dot, as best all-around midrange powder of the year. For “opinionated game” such as big hogs with those razor-honed tusks, I load Nosler Partition bullets, whether in rifle or handgun, and enjoy premium reliability for a few pennies more than regular bullets. Typical hog loads run about 850 ft-lbs in my handguns, about similar to 41 Magnum power levels, and still on the edge of the comfort and controllability limit in my hands. I don’t own a 41, nor want to, because of the shortage of available bullet size choices this week.

One more good thing to come out of the 500 S&W revolution, is that it’s really good rubber grip also fit’s the smaller K and L roundbutt grip frames. I expect a lot of folks will order them, and make the switch. That special inner backstrap shock pad really works! And one last tip concerning downloads in all these big cases, is to always use a magnum primer. It reduces powder position sensitivity of near or away from the primer, down to where it hardly matters. And on really cold days, it assures freedom from misfires and vertical stringing caused by unstable ignition. For many of us, local hunting in cold weather is the last frontier, and the only real challenge left. And for much of hunting season, it’s what we have.

So go and find someone who bought an expensive Alaskan boomer, and doesn’t handload! Offer them a lower recoil trade, worth half as much, but which they can actually use. Or offer them a source of custom midrange reloads, with their choice of bullet and power level. Better yet, teach them to reload! It’s all good.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #007. Unexpected Hunting Occurrences.

I do not refer to screw-ups here! There are lots of unusual things which can happen to hunters, which one cannot readily predict, or be well-prepared for. Perhaps an airing of the bizarre may help someone get a leg up on some situation they might not otherwise have considered, and therefore not be totally blindsided. Others will simply be glad it wasn’t them!

I was out hunting deer with my old Siamese Mauser 45-70. The load was a 350 grain JSP roundnose, at about 1900 fps. At 2800 ft-lbs of energy, this was far from a maximum load, but was four times the energy at 45 calibre with a heavy bullet, needed to very reliably kill a large Mule deer. But I was concerned that the smaller 300 grain hollow points, the next size bullet on down, would expand too much and explode the tiny Columbia Blacktail deer, which inhabited the area. I wanted 1900 fps for the good trajectory, and that is how I happened to be so over-gunned. Perhaps closer to the core of the matter, I wanted to get some practice in with the 45-70, and was using whatever local game was available, and in season.

One single big elk had wandered into the area recently, but I had no tag, and neither did the yahoo that cut it to ribbons with a Mini-14 from horseback. I include that item because no one around here expected anything like that to ever happen. It was said he emptied an entire 20 round clip, and then chased it for miles before it finally fell, from general blood loss. Also, this is to include the general unavailability of elk in the area.

Back to the Blacktails. Suddenly, right in front of me, was a darn nice buck, as big as this species gets, but with an undersize rack of antlers, on broadside presentation. This was clearly a “management buck” with defective genetics. After a century of everyone killing the big-antlered bucks and letting bucks like this one breed the next herd, someone needed to help reverse the trend. As a meat hunter, it was clearly my business to choose wisely, and it was all coming together that day.

I lined up the shot to center the lungs and therefore limit meat damage, and was squeezing the trigger, when some species of quail burst out of a bush right next to me. I pulled the shot, and it went a few inches in front of the deer, at perfect chest height. I should have cranked in a fresh round and blasted away, but the flurry of unexpected events caused me to be more interested in watching the show. I had grown up in front of a TV set, and that no doubt made me the person I am today, right now sitting in front of a computer screen, happily substituting canned information for physical presence in reality. Be that as it may. I have shared this story around campfires, and now I share it again.

Yes, I just watched as the startled deer saw that I was every bit as startled as it was. The deer seemed to wish me well, as it leaped gently and gracefully over the supersonic ripped bullet path, as though something was still there, and ambled away into the forest with dignity but prudent speed. Just like a kid in front of a TV, I was totally entertained, and just watched it all happen. If there is a good show, I’ll probably just watch the show. Permanent TV-itis. Of course, if someone is in danger, just like the TV hero, I become the show. That road runs both ways!

A few days later, it was the Hunter’s Moon, the other one. Not the full moon when deer can get a little goofy at the all-night feast and freedom from hunters during night hours, and party too much before it is actually night-time, and get harvested. Instead, it was the beginning of the 3 days of New Moon, when there is no light to forage during the night, and the deer have to eat like pigs during twilight twice a day, and then hide somewhere close to the feeding areas the remaining 23 and a half hours.

This twilight is a good time for illuminated reticle scopes, or red dot illuminated non-magnifying sights, or even big lens scopes to gather ambient light in the shadows of big trees at dawn or dusk, during the last or first legal minutes of the hunting day. I estimate about half the deer taken are found within a half hour of sunrise or sunset, on trails between habitat areas. I was set up for brush confrontations in somewhat dim light, with my T/C Contender 45 Long Colt with 750 ft-lb loads, still wearing a white dot painted front iron sight at that time.

The 180 lb. Whitetail buck, which had obviously wandered in from Eastern Oregon, and I became aware of each other’s presence at the same time. This was a different and larger buck, but another modest rack. We each simultaneously moved slowly so as to not upset the other. As the deer turned slowly away, I saw a perfect broadside opportunity coming, and met it with raised pistol in fluid motion. At about 40 yards, the 260 grain Speer JHP at 1150 fps, fully penetrated the centered chest, the deer was blown off its feet, and only kicked twice. This was about 760 ft-lbs. I had recently put a rubber grip on the T/C, and the somewhat heavy bullet at moderately elevated velocity was both comfortable and accurate in my hands. You just don’t need more power than that for ordinary deer, no matter how many 44 Magnum guns are sold, their full loads making 1100ft-lbs of energy, which most people will never be able to work up to, and shoot accurately. Handloaded midrange loads are a fix for that, and some manufacturers are coming out with them for deer hunting, despite the bluster machine’s condemnation of them. Canadian whitetails and mule deer are bigger and good hits would be required at this power level.

I had to drag the carcass across a canyon, steep down and then steep up, to get near a dirt road, for my pickup truck to do the rest of the transit work. There were coyotes yipping in the distance, so I jogged to get the pickup, and get back before the coyotes came in. Anyway, so it was that I still got my winter’s venison, despite fascination with serendipity, a good show, and the brief fellowship with a magnificent beast who was as startled as I was.

Two other times, I fell victim to saboteurs on my equipment. I am sure politics played a part, from umpteen different angles, from anti-hunting to anti-gun to anti-neighbor to who- knows-what riles some people. I was out with the T/C 45 Long Colt again, this time farting around in the sagebrush in the middle of the afternoon, hoping to “step on” a lain-up deer. I had the same load as last year, just described. About 50 yards ahead of me, a typical buck lost it’s nerve and cautiously ambled from the cover I had been heading toward by pure luck. It took a sideways path to keep an eye on me, thus presenting me with a perfect broadside shot. At slow speed, there was no need to lead the target, so I held dead on the center of the lung area. The deer reacted to the shot but didn’t miss a step, nor alter it’s saunter. I wasn’t sure whether I had hit it or not. Just to be sure, I inspected the site, and detected a drop of blood on the ground.

Any savvy hunter carries a small roll of toilet paper, for emergencies, so I affixed a single square to the uppermost branch of a tall bush, near the drop of blood. Moving the same direction I had seen the deer disappear into the sagebrush, about 20 yards later, I came upon another drop of blood. I placed another flag. So it went for 300 yards or so. Suddenly I couldn’t find another drop. I began an outward spiral from the last flag, and covered a 75 yard diameter circle in desperation. It was starting to get dark. This is what every hunter dreads. Lost wounded game. I was resigning myself to coming back in the morning to see if the coyotes would find it or not, before I did. Then suddenly, the sound of a deer falling over. That direction, about 50 yards. I raced in that direction and distance, to find my deer expired, well-concealed in a five foot high sagebrush thicket.

As I was affixing the belt-tow rope to its neck to drag it to the dirt road, this time not on the other side of any deep canyons, I saw I had hit the neck, under the chin, and cut a small artery. Most of the blood had drained into the lungs, through the half-severed windpipe, with just enough blood escaping to leave a sparse blood trail to follow. The deer drowned in it’s own blood. After I tied the other end of the short rope to my belt and trudged away, I checked my sight adjustment on the T/C. It was screwed over halfway to one side, the side I had hit! I was at once relieved it wasn’t my fault, angered that someone had done that to me and to that poor suffering animal, and determined to visually check on my sights from then on, which I could have done at any moment, and prevented the suffering of a game animal. It was all so upsetting that I almost forgot to remove the little flags, but altered my course to backtrack the route and reclaim my supplies. Once again, I was prepared.

Magnum primers have a pretty good pop. If you shoot a magnum gun, chances are you use a lot of magnum primers. This also holds true for midrange loads in those big magnum cases, such as what I use in big bore handguns for hunting. A magnum primer can shove a bullet far enough into the barrel that you have to look for it to see it, if you or someone else happens to not put any powder in the cartridge. With a bullet stuck in the bore like that, firing another bullet on top of it will likely explode the gun and parts of your body along with it, and employ the lawyers of bystanders. If ever you hear and feel just a pop when there should have been a boom with typical felt recoil, STOP and check for a stuck bullet!

I was alone and had been for a little while, when I had the pop. The law of averages says that every reloader sooner or later will forget the powder in a cartridge, likely because of some kind of distraction. I was beating myself up about it, and swearing to be more careful, as I fixed the problem. The bullet was stuck good about an inch into the rifling. I prepared an empty but magnum-primed case and filled it with black powder, from my muzzle loader hardware. Since black powder is a Class A explosive, it doesn’t need pressure confinement to go boom, like

smokeless powder does, as a Class B explosive. Even so, black powder is safely limited in the amount of pressure it can generate. Using this technique with smokeless powder, would have required starting small and working up to avoid surprises. Pointing the gun upward at a big piece of firewood for a safe backstop, and to keep the black powder back against the primer, I fired the weapon. The bullet almost made it out on the first try, but it took two kabooms.

I had been alone on the wilderness ranch for all this. Imagine my surprise when several people in town asked me about my stuck bullet. I tried to subtly find out who told whom, to see who first knew and how it was that they happened to know. But all I could determine is that someone had been out there, and planted a powderless case in my reloads. The chances anyone would have made the wilderness trip exactly to my ranch, and not said hi is suspect, and right when a bad thing happened. Clearly sabotage, and anti-hunters / anti-gun people were all over it. I had been leaving things unlocked when I was around nearby, but never again did I leave anything unlocked if my back was to be turned. I got complaints about that from people whom I would have not have trusted anyway.

The 1000 ft-lb remaining energy line on a 243 Winchester rifle loaded with 100 grain boattail bullets at 3000 fps muzzle velocity, is just past 400 yards. Because of the low recoil, folks don’t think the 243 is powerful, but that is an illusion. I had gotten a VZ-24 version of the 98 Mauser rifle cheap because it had a rotted-out barrel. Someone 2 or 3 owners before me had shot a bunch of corrosive ammo in it without cleaning it. You couldn’t keep shots on the paper at 50 yards! I had ordered a 270 Winchester hammer-forged barrel for general replacement on 98 Mausers, and they shipped me a 243 barrel with a note they were out of everything else, and I could return it. It was so cheap, I kept it and decided to see what the 6mm craze was all about. To make a fair test, I added an adjustable trigger, bedded the action, floated the barrel, and added a cheap scope. If I let the barrel cool between shots, you could cover them all with a nickel at 100 yards, when I did my part. The Nosler Partition 100 grain boattail bullets over a shoulder full case of IMR-4350 were accurate and powerful. I have never lost one head of game hit with it.

“Hit with it” being the operative phrase, one time I saw a proper management buck about 35 yards away. I was in a rocky depression about 4 feet deep, which concealed my presence from the buck, until I was ready to shoot the 243. There was simply no way to miss at that range, except that near my position, on the rim of the depression, were some of those spindly grass shoots with a cluster of seeds at the top, which I had to shoot through. I called it at 5% chance of hitting one of those shoots with the shot, but was shot down shooting a shoot. The bullet was completely deflected by a shoot as slender as the thickness of a thumbnail. The deer stared at me for a moment, and then made a broken field dodge run straight out of the deer survival text book, changing direction with every bound. I couldn’t get a bead on it for a second shot. I knew it might happen, and it did! There was no sign of a hit at the site, and no blood trail. The deer looked healthier than I was, and had appeared to be picking up speed 200 yards away when I finally lost sight of it! I doubt the 45-70 would have had as much trouble. That was the last time I ever tried to shoot through any foliage at all with the 243, but I remain a satisfied user. It works just fine when I use it properly. I did too good of a job creating the Siamese Mauser 45-70, and it looked just plain saleable. So creeps broke in and stole it, probably fencing it for pennies on the dollar, to buy who knows what. My only deer rifle suddenly was the 243. I got a better scope for it. It actually needed a longer eye relief scope, because of the very light recoil. I know that sounds backwards, but because of the low kick, people including myself tended to get cocky about shooting it, not being careful of scope cuts! After both I and one of my girlfriends both had matching scope cuts, I had to do something about it. I got a BSA Catseye 2.5-8X variable mail order, sporting a good 3 inches of eye relief. It took a few minutes to get used to, and I mounted it as far forward as I could get away with, which actually was the same position as the last scope, to prevent movement from the nonexistent recoil. So one has to not crawl the stock as much.

I don’t have all that many clear memories of when hunts went right, up to more than 50 years of hunting ago, as they sort of run together, uneventfully. It is when things don’t go right, that enduring memories get generated. The colorful language and seeming disasters when going through trials we swear are ruining a hunt, are all we will have to dwell on in our declining years. The worse it was, the better it will be someday. So it is that when speaking of hunting, it’s all good. See you out there.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #008. The Hunt For Security.

If you are reading this Internet-originated document, chances are you have dealings on the Internet, or soon will have. Besides that, we all have things to worry about, concerning security these days, and it can all tend to run together. But there seems to be a common thread emerging, as many things seem to be coming to a confrontation in this information age.

It is becoming clear that organized crime is much more pervasive than most people thought only a short time ago. Exhaustively complete records are being kept on any little detail of every American’s life, which might ever become of use to the mob for any kind of racketeering. Even the little things we might use as a password decades from now are recorded. The mob has always tried to do a lot of that, but in this information age, whatever can be recorded, will be recorded.

It came as a shock to many that the mob was caught using popular Reader programs such as Adobe Reader, already on private computers with firewalls and virus protection in place, to torrent-copy people’s entire collection of files in a few seconds when they were logged onto the internet. The only clue anyone had were the folks who had continuous readout system gauges installed on desktop, who could recognize a torrent. Everyone else had no clue.

I, personally, was using wireless LAN in a fringe location while frequently mobile, and needed such gauges to confirm I was still connected at upload/download moments. Every few days, I would see a torrent of info on the internet activity readout, and I knew this was not typical packet stuff, nor was I doing anything to create the activity myself. Then the news broke about Reader programs being used that way. I checked the history of use of mine, and saw I wasn’t using it, but someone was. I erased all parts of the program, and the torrents abruptly stopped. Shortly after that, I witnessed some private info from my files which I had only strongly suspected had been raided, be used conspicuously by strangers, in a way which both helped me and mocked me. Suspicions confirmed, and in typical mob style, gloating.

Realizing that a challenge was now on the table, I knew I had to act fast. I moved all new files which contained any mob-useful data in them into cd’s and flash drives (memory sticks). I left decoy files which contain data the mob has long had access to, on the box! Any dealing with personal data now happens with the LAN switch turned off. I also erased Bluetooth, as I wasn’t using it, and a hacker 50 feet away can use it to get in.

People who have clandestinely installed the equipment to detect and record it, usually find that about once a month for some, 6 months for others, someone gets into their private places and goes through their stuff, but nothing is taken or significantly disturbed. While some government agencies do this playing the James Bond game with suspects, the mob does a huge amount of it on just about everyone, recording everything learned. People distressed that so much of their life can be looked up on the Internet, would go into conniptions to see it all recorded by the mob, along with inventories of all the possessions they have ever had, things they have said to people since pre-school, all their involvements, including lists of both friends and acquaintances, their medical histories, social histories, any weaknesses or preferences, their dreams, plans, views, values, fears, and habits.

Threat analysis in one’s personal life is a lot more scary than level orange. We are all so vulnerable to poison gasses from upwind that the mob doesn’t have to beat anyone up anymore, but they might just to stay in practice. Besides the high-tech poisons, there are enzyme-based gas weapons which can mimic any brain chemical from terror to sex. Mob hookers use the sex stuff to make Johns feel addicted to their goodies. Strategically, certain victims can be sprayed to remain seemingly frozen in fear, while their homes are looted. Certain others are made to go blank at the ATM while their money is pilfered. Folks lying in their own beds are gas-hit with everything from migraines to impotence. But even worse is when one is sprayed in the workplace with anything from amnesia gas to clumsiness gas, or malfunction of any body part addressable with modified DNA fragment gas, as one’s entire family can be reduced to homeless, unemployed paupers. It is the plan of these closet Satanists who run organized crime, that everything everywhere be penetrated by at least one of their people, so that no one can escape from them anywhere. Every work crew, every church, every office everywhere is a penetration target for them, and they will poison out people from upwind, until they get one of their own people installed. The police and government have watched it all happen for decades, and worse than ever lately, afraid to interfere because their own family would be next. That fear is now out of date, as everyone‘s family is now a target of low level sprays. The new rules are that everyone everywhere gets sprayed, with only how much of what and how often being negotiable. This escalation of sprays, most of which mock and mimic natural conditions as a cover, is the result of half a century of cowardice of our officials.

By far the worst threat of modern times is the mob gas which uses modified DNA fragment technology in a retrovirus carrier in a hydrate base which penetrates normal walls and human skin in less than one second. You don’t even have to inhale! It can be tuned for only one person, and can easily select one person out of a crowd, if the victim is important enough to justify the expense of cooking up a batch just for that one purpose. Any body part can be targeted for a variety of malfunctions. The body can be instructed to grow a horn-like feature inside a muscle, a truly painful experience, which the body erases all evidence of immediately that the gas clears, because it contradicts the home DNA. Brain lesions can be directed to appear which resemble natural conditions, the heart instructed to have severe stumbles or quit entirely, the stomach to secrete record-breaking amounts of acid suddenly at 3 AM, which can trigger natural heart attacks, if no antacid is handy, or anyone making a long flight or car trip can be made to have blood clots in their legs, covered by the facts that all these and other hits resemble natural conditions. The options have grown over time to thousands of different types of gas. More details on all this can be found in a CIA document sent to police forces nationwide a few years ago. You may wonder why it was kept from the public this long. Keep wondering.

Running a close second to this worst threat, and some say I have these two reversed, are the various types of hypnosis gas. It was discovered by the Nazis that sodium pentothal near-blackout level doses (thiopental, etc) when combined with the usual hypnosis techniques, became a combo many times more effective than either one by itself, for brainwashing or interrogation purposes. They boasted that 100% of SS troops were “purified” by such chemical indoctrination. The technique has been used by the Gnostic Axis cult ever since to create the modern mob, and to work over people in various ways for various purposes. Progress being what it is, they by now have many more chemicals much stronger than the original pentothal. People are instructed what to do, what to say, whom to marry, where to live, what job to have, what politics to espouse, and on and on. If you see yourself saying or doing something not in your nature, acting compulsively even when you try to not do it, chances are you have been sprayed into it, and instructed to not remember so. The only way most people can reclaim their mind from this already happened, is to get very angry. Anger cuts through the gas effects, or at least it can.

But a much better technique is to simply solidly decide in advance to not cooperate with what anyone says when they have sprayed you down. You lose the ability to make decisions once the hypnosis gas hits, so you need to have decided solidly in advance to not cooperate, or believe any of their threats under those conditions. Anyone who waits until you are sprayed down to mess with you, is probably bluffing. Or at least they are a coward, and not worthy of fear or respect. It is okay to lie to them, and set up a sly defense against them, to later be useful after the gas wears off. Set up things you will be able to recognize and remember, to tip yourself off this or that is just from the spray, and they didn’t want you to remember that they did this to you. A common instruction is to not remember something for 20 years, and then to see it as a nonsense dream, and dismiss it. Used on the unwarned, that usually works. The warned can usually make it wear off in a few days.

A note of special interest to electronics-involved folks, is that one of the harassment gas types all affect semiconductors. A hydrofluoric acid mist will screw up semiconductor junctions good, and in a hydrate base, will penetrate the pores in plastic almost instantly. There are over a dozen gasses of this type, usually containing fluorine, many are odorless, and surprisingly have little effect on humans, except for use against skin viruses. Depending on specifics, your device’s operation can be affected a little or a lot, temporarily or permanently. Arranging power limitation resistors to an electronic device can often keep it from burning itself up inside some way, when hit with “short-out” gas temporarily. Fuses aren’t fast enough, in most cases. An electronic “crowbar” device might or might not be fast and precise enough to prevent damage.

If you or anyone close to you gets hit by the mob sprayers, you have a multi-faceted decision to make. They are counting on witnesses remaining silent in the fear they may be next if they talk. And the victim will likely be hit again even worse, for not covering for the creeps. But everyone’s silence has let the mob flourish with all this spray stuff, which got going into high tech mode all the way back in the late 1950’s, and has grown into what it is today, a half-century later, with an awesome arsenal. Still it is not too late. The AIDS plague has plagued the mob more than anyone else, by targeting low morals, low intelligence, and goon-like styles. They lost key people, everywhere. Plus, they were waiting for the second millennium to fulfill a satanic prophesy that they would take over the earth about now. Once again they have even passed a satanic law that everyone everywhere must be sprayed a little at least. Even the local Don. All that is negotiable is how often, how much, and with what. The real Axis is in everyone’s face, whether we realize “those symptoms” are caused by spray or not, as they vary with the wind direction.

Despite media brainwashing to the contrary, the mob is bigger now than it was under the conspicuous Dons. It’s all undercover, now. Nowdays they have a huge inventory of gasses which might only cause a variety of modest things like tinnitus, or forgetfulness, or a slight headache, or a distorted toenail. Or severe anguish unto death! “Everybody everywhere” gets hit with at least some of the lighter stuff, sometimes. These gasses are often engineered to produce similar effects to naturally occurring physical or mental conditions, and this forms a cover and a margin for gas-based racketeering. The general rule is that every naturally-occurring condition anywhere, is statistically a possible cover for two or three gas-induced hits somewhere else. This obvious and growing slavery and torture, can be stopped by anonymous tips. This is so simple, that it blows past people. Anonymous tips! Anyone who thinks they are not being sprayed, just hasn’t figured out by whom or with what yet! Let us prove that information is power.

Yes, the hunt for security has gotten strange. In today’s world, you must not give the goons any opportunity at all to escalate their position over you. Give them an inch, and they demand two inches, then three. Everything in your world is at risk, starting with your health. Get exercise when you can, and limit the things which run your health down. If your locked door can be opened with a pocket knife, get a better lock. If your padlock has a rounded latching cutout on it’s shank, and therefore can be opened by a hammer blow, get a padlock with a square-bottomed cutout on the shank. While avoiding any face-to-face confrontations with the lowlife goons they will throw at you to downgrade your position, be sly about using that pay phone somewhere to make that anonymous tip. Be warned that you must first announce that it is an anonymous tip, and be ready to hang up immediately if (1) a mobby looking person approaches to hear your conversation, which is likely, (2) the person on the other end is uncooperative in any way, as there are a lot of mob double agents primarily in reception and dispatch, and (3) most tips are called in by the criminals themselves, hoping to watch a show or neutralize a resister, and someone may have decided you are the criminal! If so, immediately hang up and walk away quickly, despite the phone ringing, so they can’t ask someone what your license number is. Limit the call to 2 minutes, and leave. Good luck! You and I are both going to need it. MAKE A COPY of this file and give it to a friend, as it may well mysteriously disappear later today.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #9. The 8mm Mauser Budget Hunt.

One good source is Mitchell’s Mausers, and there are other good, inexpensive outlets, where you can get an excellent condition 8mm M98 Mauser bolt-action military rifle, to sporterize any way you see fit. You don’t actually have to do anything to it, as good woods hunting ammo is readily available, and at normal woods ranges, the iron sights are all you need.

You can add a scope, an adjustable trigger, and a recoil pad to have the same deer rifle perhaps 20% of all American deer hunters used during the 1950’s, with good success. The new factory ammo is downloaded somewhat, because a few relic 1888 Models are still around, which can chamber 8mm, but can’t handle full loads because of various problems. Which is just fine, because the “standard” 8mm cartridge makes much more power than you need for mere deer. The new reduced factory loads are comfortable to shoot, which translates as shooter accuracy, because you don’t get distracted by having to brace for a mule kick!

Full loads were originally intended to shoot through an earthen embankment, and then a steel helmet. The competing USA 30-06 had even more power and more sectional density in it’s original .308” bullets, compared to the 8mm .323” bullets. Both rifles were intended for that use, not big game hunting. Psychologists have a name for people who think that “because they own a particular gun“, that it takes exactly that gun to kill a deer, Egocentric. Either the 8mm or the 30-06 can kill a dozen deer placed in a row, with one single shot of the original power level ammo, and a hard FMJ bullet. So a reduced power load in either case is the path of wisdom, for use on ordinary deer at typical woods ranges. Good luck finding reduced loads in 30-06, although some were recently made under a Controlled Recoil labeling, but they all sold out before I saw any of them. So many people are given to blustering and macho levels of unnecessary recoil, that they openly consider downloading the 30-06 to not only be unpatriotic, but a communist plot! If you reload, you can download to match, say a 30-30, or 300 Savage, or make whatever power level you want. However, the 8mm stuff comes already downloaded just about right for woods deer hunting, and in good supply right off the shelf, just because of an accident in history! Enjoy!

Fancy replacement stocks are available for the M98, and any calibre based upon the basic Mauser case, or the 30-06 case can easily be converted to, just by fitting a new barrel. With a modest amount of relieving of the magazine rails by a gunsmith, the basic 308 Winchester family of cases can just as easily be converted to, with merely a new barrel. All these cartridges have identical case head dimensions, to all exactly fit the bolt face of the M98 rifle’s action. This makes over a dozen calibre options. I, personally, bought an M98 made by the Czechs, the VZ-24, and got it cheap because someone had shot the old surplus corrosive ammo in it, and not cleaned the bore, with gross results. But I had intended to rebarrel it, and everything worked out ok. I could just as easily have hunted with the original barrel, if it had been in good shape, but shots wouldn‘t stay on the paper at 50 yards, with the old rotted out bore. I eventually settled on 243 Winchester Calibre for mine, as I was in a Columbia blacktail area, and they are a smaller deer species that you really don’t want too much gun for, from a meat damage standpoint.

Shortly before the turn of the 20^th Century, the 32-40 Calibre was thought of as the standard deer calibre, for the most reliable deer hunting use. The 32-40 Winchester was near the top of popularity in the deer fields, and the less powerful 32-20 still took its share of venison home too, often needing multiple hits. The 44-40 was edged out by the less powerful 32-40 because it had better range from higher velocity from a smaller bullet. However, in 1895, the sudden simultaneous availability of the 32 Winchester Special and the 30-30, and smokeless powder to put in them, edged out the 32-40 Calibre in the mind of the public, but all the 32’s still worked just fine. Folks generally avoided use of larger guns like the 45-70 and 38-55, because of the damage to dinner, and the amount of powder and lead they consumed, in what some have called “overkill” or “deader than dead”. For some time, the 30-40 Krag was only available to the military, and was not a factor in civilian deer hunting.

Well, with 32 calibre being a hunter standard, even if few remember it, the wide availability today of 8mm bullets in .323” instead of the old .321” in now-obsolete rifles, makes it a circus of potential for handloading the M98, for all kinds of hunting in the USA. Between the 8mm Mauser and the 8mm Magnum, we have 8mm bullets to work with, and always will. With a modest investment in reloading equipment which will likely pay for itself eventually in ammo savings, you can make high quality 8mm ammo specially designed for either long range use, dangerous game use, low recoil ammo for forest use on ordinary deer, higher recoil ammo for elk or moose, or whatever your idea of general-purpose ammo might be. It’s a matter of deciding what you want a particular batch to do, consulting a reloading manual, getting together the supplies and tools, and just creating it! Everything you need, from the reloading manual, I suggest either Hornady or Speer, which both contain excellent tutorials on the art of reloading cartridges, to powder, bullets, primers, tools, and cases, which can come from mail order outfits like Midway USA, or several other good vendors on the internet, or your friendly local gunshop. One can start with just the manual, and form opinions on what else to get as one’s perspective widens, from reading the manual. You will be amazed at what all is in these manuals!

Assuming you already have the manual, let us discuss strategy. First up, low-recoil loads for ordinary deer. The Hornady #3220 bullet is 125 grains in weight, which if loaded to 2600 feet per second (fps) makes 1876 foot-pounds (ft-lbs) of mechanical energy measured right at the rifle’s muzzle. That is like a 30-30 in energy, long accepted as plenty of power for good lung hits on ordinary deer at typical 75 to 100 yard woods distances, at which range almost all deer are taken. They will run an average of 40 yards. We all should be so lucky as to suffer as little as this, when our turn comes. I would rather not cringe in agony seemingly forever with tubes stuck in me, and would trade with the deer, if I could. If in field testing, you decide to load a little higher, perhaps because you plan to hunt Upper Peninsula Michigan, or some other place known for big deer, there is no one stopping you. The 8mm can make more power than you are going to enjoy hanging onto. But you already have power and trajectory for average deer, and a load which will not screw up your aim from heavy recoil. If you set the sights 2 inches high at 100 yards, with this bullet at this velocity, it will hit 2 inches low at 200 yards. In forest hunting where you can’t even see past 150 yards hardly ever, what more does a person need? Even so, a good scope will improve your sight picture dramatically over the iron sights, and those big lenses gather light for seeing into shadows at twilight when most deer venture forth. If you want more power, you can either add more powder, as shown in the reloading manual, raise it a little at a time and see how it goes, or use a heavier bullet, perhaps at a higher loading of powder as described as safe in the manual. But ordinary deer simply don’t need more power than this when properly hit, centering the lungs, for example, of the biggest target in the vitals.

Oh yes, the bigger deer, or elk if you have the tag for them. The 8mm / 32 Calibre is large! Big enough that you simply don’t need to spend money on premium bullets for the larger beasts with thin skin, such as all deer, antelope, and goat species worldwide. Speer, Hornady, Sierra, and others, offer economical 150 grain 8mm bullets, which can take large elk at reasonable distances, average feral hog (despite their thick skin), or huge deer at any distance you can get a good hit on them. Since longer shots at elk are more or less normal, in mountainous terrain to boot (literally), we are now up to one of those long range loads, which is going to kick more than a lot of people are going to like. In fact the manuals list the 150 grain spitzer (pointed) bullet at 2900 fps as a maximum load. Work up to this load a grain at a time from a safe lower level of power, checking for any signs that this load might be making too much pressure in your particular gun. The manuals cover this topic thoroughly, how flattened primers and such mean you should back off a couple grains of powder, perhaps because your chamber might be slightly tighter than the usual, which you can easily correct for with a couple grains less powder, to “enjoy” the biting recoil of the very top loads, and the performance you have paid for and now need. The 150 grain bullet at 2900 fps makes 2880 ft-lbs of energy at the muzzle, and still has over 1000 ft-lbs left at 400 yards. Set the sights 2” high at 100 yards, and it hits dead on at 200 yards. A good laser rangefinder can tell you how much to hold over at the determined range. Again, you simply don’t need this much power for ordinary deer at normal woods ranges, and chances are it will take you months of practice getting used to full loads like this, which you will likely never find enjoyable, unless you get addicted to being mulekicked, like some do.

Backing this load down to the same 2600 fps as the 125 grain load, produces a good general purpose load, which ought to hit about the same out to 200 yards, without sight readjustment. At 2250 ft-lbs of muzzle energy, it will have fairly stiff recoil, but will take any thin-skinned animal at normal woods ranges, out to 200 yards, worldwide. You can hunt with the 125 grain loads, and keep 2 or 3 of these in your pocket, in case a huge buck or a mule deer stops by!

The factory load for 8mm these days is just perfect for light brush busting in forest deer hunting. It is usually a 170 grain roundnose at perhaps 2500 fps. This is more than you need for any size deer, at 2360 ft-lbs of muzzle energy, but you have a bit of extra steam if the deer is standing behind very light foliage. Assume a 5 degree deflection from a leaf or two. If the deer is right behind the bush, you’re covered, maybe. This is also a very good load for large feral hog or Black bear. That’s Black bear, not Brown bear, which are very much tougher and definitely qualify as dangerous game.

The Brown bears have a thick layer of gristle over the shoulders and down the sides, which tends to function as a bulletproof vest, unless hit with a big bullet under good steam! And they tend to be grumpy when awake. If you annoy one and fail to control the situation, the bear will eat you. Don’t feed the bears!

Hornady, Speer, and others make 200 to 220 grain softnose bullets in 8mm. All of these and similar softnose ingots, are suitable for dangerous game full loads in the Western Hemisphere.

Only use Full Metal Jacket roundnose 8mm bullets on dangerous game in Africa, if they will let you do it legally anywhere there this century. It worked with multiple hits early in the last century, and was considered very stimulating by those who survived it. It is not for nothing that the .400” minimum Calibre is required for dangerous game in most of Africa. Don’t get reamed by a rhino, or crushed by a Cape buffalo!

But a century of success using 200 to 220 grain or heavier softnose bullets on brown bears at 2500 ft-lbs of muzzle energy or so in Siberia, where the largest brown bears on the planet live, has not changed, even though people selling the new magnum rifles say you need a magnum rifle. The Brown bear tool of choice in Siberia right now is the 7.62 NATO/ 308 Winchester reloaded with the biggest bullets they can find in 308 calibre!. Western hemisphere Brown and Grizzly bears are not as big. Still, if I were planning an Alaskan safari for Grizzlies, I would take a new Model 1895 Marlin in 45-70, with the top loads for that gun specified in reloading manuals. Any grizzly in reasonable range can be on you in 3 seconds, though they usually dally about, savoring the situation of possibly having peopleburgers for brunch.

For a cheap first rifle which can be upgraded and/or modified as much as any gun ever has been, easily and cheaply, you can’t beat an M98 Mauser. The action is one of the strongest ever built, and almost all of the more modern bolt actions were a simple upgrade of the basic Mauser design, or a near-copy. That kind of success, albeit from 1898, can give one a moment’s pause, and be all the rifle most of us will ever need. I like mine.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #10. Similar Opposites.

As hunters, we develop the warrior nature to get results, among other motivations. We swing the sword of intelligence to “objectively” divide the reality into this and that, here and there, workable or unworkable. Conversely, “subjective” awareness allows all things to stand as equals, despite the reality of the situation. Subjective reality has it’s place, for example in viewing everyone’s rights. Or a mother not choosing a favorite child, but loving them all equally.

But there is a time and place for most everything. It is time to be an axe killer when crazed aggressors try to murder your family while you are gathering firewood, not that this happens a lot, but there has always been some place in the world where the threat looms. Don’t judge too quickly. A true warrior gathers facts before finalizing things, and keeps en eye on it to see if any “facts” have changed. To act without tight decision process would be a subjective move, and it might not be the right time for that.

As usual, there is a vulture in the ointment. A lot of things which seem similar at first, turn out to be near-opposites. The most important such conundrum, in my opinion, is between strength and meanness. Right after puberty, young men are sorting out their having suddenly conquered fear when they weren’t even looking, and somehow easily confuse the difference between strength and meanness, often equating the two, spurred on by school pep rallies. Sports are important, as the remnants of tribal warring instinct have to be worked out somehow, but young people easily get the idea it is all about meanness being heroic, which is not specifically true. A genuine heroic act might or might not involve defeating an opponent, which might or might not involve some form of meanness, and usually does not. In one closeup view, it takes a genuinely strong person to be polite to someone who clearly doesn’t deserve it! Meanness would have usually worsened the situation, in most but not all cases. The true warrior is always having to sort such things out. Meanness may be directly related to a brain enzyme. One way to check this out is to eat a big spoonful of the herb Basil raw. The feelings you may experience from this seem related to meanness some kind of way, and you must decide for yourself what all this means. Something is going on with this, but exactly what may not be clear at this time. Conversely, the Marines storming a beach are properly a prime example of studied and cold meanness, as lethal as it gets. Those same Marines have toy drives at the holidays!

The difference between peace and oppression, is illustrated by the Pax Romana. The Roman victors wrote the history, and painted themselves as heroes for having crucified entire towns because someone spit in the face of a roman soldier! They kept the entire European world quiet for a long time. Dead people make quiet neighbors. Many thought that Israel had nearly succeeded in tricking God into attacking the Romans, so they simply erased Israel. When actual competition appeared in the form of the Huns and others, the utterly corrupt empire had to nationalize the property of Christians, the only locals who had used conservative values to prosper and have good health, and take over their religion as well in an attempt to control God, in vain attempts to beat back the Huns. Bribery eventually worked, and once again there was something resembling peace. Whether you call it peace or oppression often depends upon which end of the sword you are on. A warrior standing apart must fight first with all the subjective brainwashing over all the facts, to get a clear view. And hope one does not get thrown to the lions for asking questions.

Oh yes, the difference between Religion and Spirituality. Conservative religionists either claim there is no difference, since their religion owns all spirituality, or that spirituality is the symptoms of crazy people, who defy the church government. Radical spiritualists tend to view religions as jails for the spirit. Personally, I find it convenient to think of spirituality as one’s internal connections with God, and religion as one’s external and material connections with God. That works for me, and it might be noted that internal and external are opposites. Without the external material religion stuff, humans would forget their spirituality eventually. Spiritualists may therefore see religions en totum as a necessary evil. Likewise, religionists may well see spirituality as both a wrongfulness, and also as a neophyte longing for the order and oppression of people with sticks. Not exactly opposites, but not far from it. A final difference between spirit and religion seems to be that the spirit people seem a rough and ready bunch, finding spirit wherever it may be. The religion folks feel it is all conquered territory for them, and even bringing up the subject like we are here, is blasphemy punishable by throwing to whatever “lions” are handy. Here we see a pure thing being used for evil.

This brings up a point. Jesus is often called the Prince of Peace, and spoke of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, etc. And in his honor, the Crusaders slaughtered anyone who got in their way, and some guy was sentenced to death by THE CHURCH for inventing the telescope. The Koran more than doubled in size before the professional priests, who were not supposed to exist according to the Koran, agreed to write it down, having added such things as killing “infidels”, and a marriage being dissolved if there is no sex for 30 days. I had a splitting headache for 6 weeks of flu long ago, and sex was impossible! Clearly that must have been Devil flu. Somebody added a big section to the Jewish Talmud, describing dozens of crimes against non-Jews which are permitted. Do correct me if I just imagine a pattern forming here. It appears obvious that (1) there is nothing so good and pure in this world of humans that it cannot be converted into something evil, and (2) there is nothing so good and pure that it cannot be used by humans as a phony excuse for evil. A “funky monkey” species has it’s hands full trying to evolve above such things, when it has trouble admitting that “criminal genetics” even exists! Or that genetic shift exists, despite the fact farmers and ranchers have knowingly worked with it for a long time, decrying bad seed in 3500 year old texts.

Over the ages, many obscure scholars have noticed that Good and Evil sometimes gradually assume each other’s external forms, from some appearances and viewpoints. The fact they tried to talk about it is perhaps what resulted in their becoming obscure! This is a subject worthy of many campfires, and a daypack full of books. Don’t miss seeing that buck with your nose in a book! Thusly, I sidestep this both slippery and sticky issue, as I am obscure enough as it is.

The stickiest case of similar opposites I know of is the disparity between the small percentage of honest hopeful illegal immigrants to the USA, and similarly appearing criminal genetics adhering itself to the local divisions of the mob, the larger percentage it seems. Let’s deal in certainties, for a moment. If a legal, respectful, and dignified avenue were made available at US Embassies “around the globe” for temporary workers of good repute and character, to travel to the USA in dignity and safety, there would need to be expanded Embassy personnel to handle it! Fact #1, is that there is no shortage of proper temporary workers worldwide, panting at the prospect of work in the USA. Fact #2, the present non-system has given priority to bandito types, who outnumber all other illegal immigrants. I feel it is obvious that such people are not proper immigrants, and the fact most of them haven’t been caught yet in major crimes, is only temporary. Everyone knows most criminals commit many crimes before actually being caught by thinly spread police. It is democracy gone wild that criminals are equated with good citizens! The very idea that criminals be allowed to stay and permanently cause total gene pool shift toward criminality of the USA, in “pirate colonization“, is repugnant to any decent folk who actually think about it. Good luck sorting it all out!

Help and Sabotage! OUCH! How many times has one of those turned into the other, and bit us on the backside? I don’t really want to dwell on this one because it’s just too obvious and painful! And worst of all, most such sabotage not only will never be credited as what it really is, but it is often billable in some way! It is possible for sabotage to end up as being helpful somehow, but don’t count on it. So the two are not quite exact opposites, but close enough! Bookkeepers may well notice my use of the concept credited to a billable account, which actually makes it bigger.

And now onward to the most troublesome issue of them all, the dichotomy between truth and truth! That is, between one person’s truth and another person’s truth. Let’s take a sample case, involving death, dismemberment, large organizations, hugely biased public opinion, respected organizations, public fear, enormous amounts of money, government agencies, cover-ups, the mob, child victims, and more. No, it’s not war this time, it’s the actual cause of most type 2 diabetes. In the early 20^th century, before there was bromine-bleached wheat flour, juvenile diabetes was virtually unknown. If anyone under 30 turned up with diabetes, they would make them repeat the test and be more careful about sample contamination! But shortly after the introduction of bleached “balloon bread”, lots of children started having diabetes. The bleached bread companies were facing lawsuits the size of which haven’t been seen since then! Lots of studies were commissioned, mostly to find the component of bleached flour that was doing it, and to prove that it was not to blame. Yes, there was a component, a modified enzyme, which when distilled directly from commercial bleached flour, could cause rapid damage to the pancreas of lab animals, giving them diabetes. Then and now, any good lab can repeat this testing, and it needs to be done, because the original test results have all mysteriously disappeared. They used this modified enzyme, extracted from commercial bleached flour, to give laboratory animals diabetes, to study diabetes!

A second fact emerged from the tests, that only one third to one half the public was at risk, largely depending upon whether there was diabetes in their family’s medical history. Today, we know this to be the result of a variation of the genes, FABP2, in about half the public, and about a dozen other gene variations which seem to be also involved. That‘s a lot of folks. This difference in resistance to the modified enzyme in bleached flour, was used to falsify the studies, way back when. These falsified studies were enough to dismiss the lawsuits, and make dissenters appear as whackos who got whacked by “gangbusters”, working for organized crime to silence interference to the bleached flour industry cash flow. Researchers who complained that half the public was excluded from the studies, were scoffed at by paid shills, saying people who already had or “were about to have” diabetes were properly excluded from the supreme race, er….uh….the proper testing!

Further complicating the issue, is the fact that virtually all organic-related enzymes are degraded or destroyed by high temperatures, including the pancreas-damage synthetic enzyme in most bleached flour. The center of a loaf of bread doesn’t get hot enough for this, but when folks make toast, the temperature probably destroys most or all enzymes present, good or bad. It seems also that boiling for a while similarly destroys all or nearly all enzymes or modified enzymes. How much boiling at what elevation is necessary for complete safety, is not known at this time. Better to simply not eat poison.

People notice a lot of things at a subliminal, or superstitious, or customary- accommodation level. Lots of people started boiling everything in the kitchen to death, about the same time the Juvenile Diabetes Blight suddenly appeared. Two major possibilities loomed; one, that overcooking causes diabetes (which some people still think), or two, that overcooking everything including stuff with bleached flour in it, prevented generalized bad health from undiagnosed pancreas damage, and people noticed, quickly adopting “overcooking everything” without knowing the exact mechanism of success. The latter seems to track with what is now known, despite the fact a lot of vitamins and such are erased along with the poison.

Strategically speaking, a small amount of intact bleached flour, won’t make that much difference to a person, assuming no wheat allergy, but can easily cause a habit of not avoiding it, which will in fact have a cumulative damage effect in up to half the public, over time! Bleached wheat flour in common foods, often is simply labeled “enriched”, which when I find it difficult to escape from, I can often either toast or boil somehow, or greatly limit the consumption of. In any case, at this time I offer a toast of real toast to your health! And add that it seems to me, manufacturers should be required at least to label bleached flour products as containing bleached flour, so fewer latent diabetics will face amputations later in life, which are simply not properly part of their own particular future. Those who actually want amputations are on their own, have their rights to privacy and elective cosmetic surgery. I personally feel that people should not have parts of their nose amputated, but that’s just me, and I don’t hassle anyone over it. I have always felt that the reason I have a big nose is because the air is free.

So now today, we have sincere people working for the Juvenile Diabetes Association, who either never heard the real story, or are committed to saving everyone’s good name, including all that cash flow and looming enormous lawsuits (both of which will surely will involve the mob), so their truth is different from an actual scientist’s truth. The government, as usual, is trying to split the difference between right wing and left wing, as the factual truth slowly emerges, by simply saying whole grain minimally processed food is good for you. Nothing is likely to change any time soon. The bread industry quickly introduced a new bleached whole wheat bread, as though the poison was actually a good thing. Someone would rather poison children than take a chance on being sued, while clearly digging a deeper hole. The government will likely not act, and we cannot expect better from them, for two reasons.

First, it has been included in charter documents that one of the purposes of government is to ensure domestic tranquility. The sudden truthing of America in this way would upset the stock market. Secondly, in democratic process, no action is ever taken without some sort of right wing/ left wing coalition. Arithmetically, there likely otherwise wouldn’t be enough votes, necessary to swing it.

Tribal identification instinct ( yea team! ) almost always takes precedence over facts among humans. As witness nearly a century of amputations on unnecessary diabetes victims, even medical cash flow is preservable on a tribal basis. Of course, now I am responsible for everyone’s suffering , for being the one to point all this out, and making stupid people look stupider, and bad people look worse. Still, I wonder if the government can be successfully sued to require the FDA to require first line labeling of bleached flour on food ingredient lists, for foods containing bleached flour, under the Equal Protection statute, for 1/3 the public being at risk? Already it sounds complicated, for such a simple thing, so desperately needed by so many.

The most slippery set of near identical opposites I can think of, are spoken assumptions and unspoken assumptions. It is assumed that the spoken and unspoken assumptions are the same. But often the unspoken assumptions are the near opposite of the spoken assumptions. The most inflammatory example I can think of is the assumption of a person’s sexual orientation, pursuant to employment. It is just as bad, whether it is gay or straight pressure. I have been fired from many jobs because someone assumed that because I am also a musician, that I “must be” a closet homosexual. It has been both because someone was angered that I turned out to be straight, and also because someone later found out I was also a musician and assumed I was gay! You can imagine how exasperating this is for anyone similarly situated. But by far the worst is when both happen at the same time, and a right wing / left wing coalition forms in unspoken assumption space against the victim! This actually happens more often than not, in such cases.

With all the group hypnosis and cultural brainwashing observable in all orientations everywhere, I don’t expect anything thusly involved to change a lot any time soon. I sincerely hope my bravery on some of these topics will inspire others to be equally brave against real opponents, and not just assault the messenger. In conclusion, all I can offer is that the path of the warrior / hunter is not easy, but because of the better chance at truth one has a shot at, there are always good times and the knowing that you are right about something.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #11. Wildcatting As A Process.

Well, yes and no. In fact, anything you can say about cartridge wildcatting , it’s yes and no. As soon as any kind of rule or even trend emerges, just as quickly an exception pops up! There is nothing wrong with this, unto itself. That’s just how it usually happens.

The question whether you should start with the bullet, the brass, or the need, yes, all three of these simultaneously is the preferred process. And how often does that happen? Hard to tell, but not real often!

Let’s walk through a process of wildcatting and see what happens. Let’s say the “need” is a calibre for aged calcium-challenged shooters to go handgun hunting, without muzzle brakes which would destroy what remains of Gramps’ hearing the first time the hearing protection got bumped and shifted in a real hunting situation. Just enough power to do the job out to 120 yards, with not enough felt recoil to cause stress-cracks in those old hand bones, which would make it Gramps’ last hunt permanently!

Let’s assume either a Columbia Blacktail or similar smaller species, or a Whitetail doe crop damage permit, requiring less power for a humane kill than a good-sized Whitetail buck would need. And certainly less than a Canadian whitetail! For example 500 ft-lbs delivered energy at 32 calibre, on such a short range good hit, is just enough to do the job reliably, on this specified modest-sized deer. Or assume a 25 calibre, and 100 grains or more of bullet weight, with 600 ft-lbs delivered energy. Larger deer would require more power and / or calibre. Dropping to 24 calibre and 100 grain bullets, the energy requirement sharply rises, so that’s out for our purposes. It’s even worse at 22 calibre, where 1000 ft-lb delivered energy is a good idea, so that’s out too, in this case. At 6.5mm or so, the larger footprint and usually bigger bullet mass have a noticeable multiplier effect on effectiveness, and at 32 calibre and above, 500 ft-lbs in the boiler room becomes reliably lethal on modest sized deer, such as we now specify, for a marginal situation to begin with.

Of course, those wishing to limit the run distance of hit game will see it in terms of how much power for instant kills! Sometimes you really need that, like in steep goat country! In such situations, this plus the need for extreme range power shooting, causes the sellers of magnum rifles to salivate. The African nations collectively know that a 40 calibre hole in the vitals is lethal to everything on the planet, no matter how slow the bullet that made it, and this is reflected in their usual calibre restrictions. We have defined the extremes of the continuum!

Since our range distance is minimal, short runs of hit game tolerated, the game easy to kill, and felt recoil our major “oops” factor, this means we limit bullet size to 100 grains or so, as heavier bullets recoil a lot more, and the 100‘s are big enough to do the job without the steep energy requirement. For good Ballistic Coefficient (BC) bullets, this immediately specifies either .257” or .264” bore, because of bullet availability. A rimmed cartridge for easy handling in that specialty single-shot pistol’s (SSP) 14 inch barrel, by Gramps’s old fingers on a cold day is a good idea. So, without wildcatting at all, what could a person do quickly?

The 6.5 JDJ, at .264” bore can, and for our purposes must be downloaded, as we just don’t need the astounding 300 yard range on large deer-sized game, for use at short range on our specified smaller deer, by geriatrics patients! The Grandsons will probably borrow the SSP a lot and risk mixing their full-power 140 grain hog loads with Gramps’ geriatric specials, but Gramps would probably be all over this with felt pen marked cartridges which Grandma keeps safely locked up for him! It is noted that the fabled 6.5 JDJ is in fact a wildcat, however right now we were thinking of making one of our own. So the search continues. (SSK Industries.com for 6.5 JDJ availability).

In a corner of our arena, the sweet old 25-35 calmly awaits our attention. Long accepted as the practical minimum for carbine woods range deer taking, out to 150 yards for large deer, the 14” barrel of an SSP limits range thusly to 120 yards, exactly what we need, and large deer are covered! This old sweetheart is probably the most Rapid Chambering profiled cartridge ever developed! Thankyou Winchester!. Conversely, that profile has been sacrificed by some wanting slightly improved ballistics, in what they considered too marginal a situation, perhaps for use at longer ranges on larger game than deer, such as the P.O. Ackley Improved version, a wildcat more or less standardized merely by the name Ackley! My conversations with him revealed a man who never intended to have a cult following, or make the 40 degree shoulder a sacrament. Whenever he considered using a 30 degree angle, people would pressure him to “stay with 40”, and they were his friends, so he did. Whatever your place in shooting, that nice guy with a good idea and enough moxie to pull it off, remains part of the landscape, as encouragement for other wildcatters. The fact that the gains in powder capacity were often only 5 to 10%, doesn’t make much difference to either performance, or to the fact people got involved at more than just a consumer level in their sport.

Winchester still makes 25-35 Winchester cases at standard prices, for the “new” cowboy action shooting events which have become so popular, with period clothing and events of many kinds to various tastes. The low recoil weapons score the highest in the hands of regular people, who haven’t trained forever, to withstand magnum kicks. So the 25-35 has found new life and younger friends, in the winner’s circle.

One idea is to use an Encore action for a T/C 25-35 SSP (Thompson/Center, single shot pistol). The extra pound in weight will help both pointing, and soaking up recoil from Gramps’ hands. Also, I sectioned a modern Winchester 25-35 case the other day, and it looks pretty stout to me. I saw brass thickness in all the important areas to justify a 48,000 cup (copper units of pressure, similar to psi) rating in either a bolt action, or the vault-like lockup of a T/C Encore! And the Grandkids will have a great time flattening primers and distorting cases so much that Gramps simply flattens and throws them in the recycling metals, and Grandma saves out some new ones, for Gramps’ safety.

In the Hornady 5^th Edition Reloading Manual, they have documented a similar 25-35 project for the Encore action and a 20 inch barrel. Also, because these loads might be used in older guns, they were somewhat conservative in their conclusions. Adding all these offsetting factors together, (1) intended use at closer handgun distances, (2) on smaller, rather than huge deer, (3) with 100 grain Nosler Partition bullets, which many liken to using the next calibre upward in size or power, (4) using a 16 ¼ inch long specialty pistol barrel, sure to be useable in a variety of legality changes over the years, and (5) loading to the actual Encore safe pressures for the modern manufacture of brass, not a wimpy compromise load safe in weaker actions; it all comes out very encouraging! I solidly believe this will work out just fine in the described arena, based upon known ballistics. ( I haven’t tried it, but I have used comparable specs. I calculate the 1000 ft-lb line will be around 120 yards, or better. Use a scope.) Clearly you are on your own in interpreting the pressure signs well-covered in every reloading manual. When I encounter pressure signs on a cold day, I reduce the load a bit more than if it happened on a hot day, because hot days raise pressures a grain or two worth by themselves, and those January rounds might get shot in July!

Well, now that it is established that no wildcat is needed, perhaps we can get around to describing one. I will not make this wildcat because I already have traded for a lifetime supply of 25-35 cases, brand new at a good price, still in the Winchester sealed bags of 50 ea. Since I reload, the three bags full will do for me someday, and so far I can still use big bore handguns at reduced midrange power out to the 75 to 100 yards I usually stalk to.

Anyway, if you still want to, look up the 445 Super Magnum, by Elgin Gates, in your Hornady reloader’s manual. The 25-35 has about a 44 Magnum’s worth of powder, on a 100 to 117 grain bullet in 25 calibre. If the 445 were necked down in a standard wildcat way to 25 calibre, you would realize somewhat more than this much powder in the wildcat case, perhaps the 25-445 for want of a more colorful name.

The realities are such that when wildcatting, you can save hundreds of dollars if you can cheaply cobble together some sample cases which can be fire-formed in a custom made barrel, to send off to the die-makers to come up with some classy and professional-quality reloading and cartridge-forming dies for you at not much more than standard die prices. They “must” have fired cases. Forget pleading. One way or another you have to come up with fired cases from an already-made and fired barrel! One option is to give a gunsmith drawings and money, to create temporary dies to come up with a few cases, for this purpose. I now choose a different plan, being a compulsively resourceful type, myself.

So here is one alternate plan. You can easily grind off material from the bottoms of hardened standard dies, cheaply available mail order, perhaps from Midway USA, Graf, and others, to shorten the length of the internal cavity. Bevel the mouths after such grinding, to avoid scratching up your cases. Plan on screwing up a few cases, getting the lengths right, and measure how much to grind on the sacrificial dies’ bottoms. Use a shortened 300 Magnum die as an interim sizing die, and a shortened 260 Remington die for final external sizing. Get a neck reamer setup from Forster, or work out an external neck-turning routine to end up with the equivalent of reaming at .2555”, or whatever you choose, for the neck thickness you want.

The 445 Supermagnum case is rated for Contender pressures, not Encore pressures. This means around 36,000 CUP, if the lockwork is set up for full specs, and often it is not. I’d rather not say how much more some folks will try to get away with, often springing the metals! Have a T/C experienced gunsmith install the heavy duty lockwork, if you want maximum 36,000 CUP loads.

You might send these fire-formable cases, some fresh 445 cases, and the dies you have modified, to J.D. Jones at SSK Industries (on the web), with a drawing of exactly how long you want the neck length, the processes you settled on to get this far, and your thoughts on things in general. See how much he wants, how backed up he is, etc. Discuss all options. A membership in HHI, Handgun Hunters International, may be suggested. It’s a good idea. Or tell J.D. your dream wildcat designs, and he can make it all happen with the best specs you can get anywhere!

Think up your own design, perhaps inspired from this one plan, for some other wildcat. Cool! Go for it.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #12. Letting Format Dictate Design or Perception.

You know that people tend to make circular designs when given a circular piece of paper and something to write with. When we apply that knowledge to the fact paper is virtually always supplied in rectangular form, and whatever gets put on that paper shapes our lives, it might get a little scary! Not real scary, but it ought to make a person wonder, just a little bit, what might have been different. What is meant by rectangular thinking? How would we know, viewing it from inside itself, in our own thusly conditioned minds, probably being in a rectangular room at the time, or outdoors on a rectangular piece of real estate? Perhaps we can also call this the hunt for clear thinking!

I have experienced my share of circular arguments and situations, and am certainly not seeking more of that. Conversely, heads of state seem to do their best work, free from outside controlling influences, in the well-known Oval Office! When I move into a new apartment, I can feel myself being sucked into the four bare corners just a little, but that is swept away by my piling things in the corners initially to get them out of the way for yet more stuff coming in. Rugs are almost universally worn out in the exact center first, unless other factors are at work, such as a cheaper smaller rug placed in the exact center to cover or prevent the worn spot!

It is observable that confrontations begin in the exact middle of an area, and then they move toward some kind of corner for trickery or entrapment purposes, from wrestling to chess. It is observable that in households where there is a lot of tension, and people trying to avoid confrontations, that furniture will be arranged to not have a centered confrontation area in any room, a kind of anti-Feng Shui! Both kinds work better than they should, in my opinion.

Format can be a lot more than just the shape of an arena. If you have ever rode a motorcycle or whatever that makes a lot of vibration, for a few hours or so, you no doubt have noticed that it numbs your senses to an extent. Likely then you noticed yourself overreacting to things to make sure you covered them, and for not having access to a lot of details and logic you normally would have had easily come to you. This type of continuous concussion, if made chronic as part of one’s usual environment, can cause serious health problems, and affect the lives of others. One friend of mine was really tickled to own a new four cylinder engine motorcycle, since his old bike had a lot of vibration. The new smooth four didn’t aggravate his arthritis! But most importantly, he was clear-minded when he arrived at work, and he made more money on sales commissions, being able to relate to people better in a finer identification with their needs and feelings.

I can only speculate what total difference it would make if police departments nationwide specified only four cylinder motorcycles be purchased from now on. Officers I have known before and after spending way too long getting their teeth rattled all day every day, seem changed by it to me. I am betting that their health would be better as well, with non-vibration duty. I have seen people’s attitudes become grosser and unfeeling from hog vibration on both sides of the badge. If that is what people want, we know how to get it. Or if we don’t want that result, we know how to avoid it. I personally feel the fours have a more suburban and less pirate-like image as well, and they start easier. Not that I plan to move to the suburbs. And the tactic of some departments to use a smaller contingent of powerful dirt bikes set up for street-legal and police-equipped, to cover that base which evil forces would flow into if they did not have it covered, remains a snag in this. Large single cylinder snorters dominate the field, but multi-jug dirt bikes are becoming more available, at somewhat less vibration.

UPDATE. I just saw a Kawasaki 1000 Police, motorcycle. It does my heart good to see that others feel the same way I do on something important. It’s a 4 cylinder. It looks good. I got a little chuckle seeing that the 4 pipes are arranged to not show well from an observer’s point of view! Pleasing everyone is never easy, but this is close to it.

I am still looking for just the right piece of land about a mile the other side of a clump of trees, to retire on. Those are getting more scarce these days, and require more than retirement income. This format is a sign of the times. Land-gouging has replaced people’s rights to be somewhere at all. It seems every hotel and housing association everywhere feels it is being robbed every time they see someone in an RV, not paying them! So brainwashing and group-hypnosis games are purveyed upon the public usually through media, that everyone must have by unwritten law or written law, a physical address they are paying or have paid for, even if they don’t need it. A lot of people have “nomadic” genetics. In their minds, the advantages and drawbacks of being tied to one piece of land are just about equal. There are a lot of people with this type or similar genetic instincts, and under the Constitution and other founding documents, all have a right to exist. To exist, you have to be somewhere. In many cities, laws have been passed which make it illegal for certain people to sleep! Other laws are passed in certain cities which make existence at all, illegal for some selected people. It seems if a city law is absurd enough, people are brainwashed to just laugh it off. So far these nomadic peoples are not well organized, but that can change. Already, legal representation is seeing association with them as a career-builder, rather than formerly as the kiss of death to an attorney’s career, amid laughter of their colleagues.

A lot of people stop laughing, though, when just by being in some mob person’s way at work, they turned out to be only two or three paychecks away from moving their family into their RV. Suddenly no one will hire them because they are unemployed. Suddenly no one will rent a cheap place to them because they are homeless. Suddenly no one will let them park, because they are in a vehicle, and the trailer parks are both full and too expensive. Even UPS will not accept packages for them because they no longer physically exist as Americans, with no physical address, even if they have a post box! Companies often refuse to send rebates to their post box, knowing they can get away with it. This oft-repeated collection of scenes these days is beyond outrageous. The huge amount of public lands, especially out west, is totally locked up for use only by mob-connected cattle barons to run near-overloads of cattle, and harass hunters, property-owning neighbors, and vacationers, with illegally locked gates. Clearly some of this land near cities could be used for new trailer and RV parks. But the format is often public brainwashing to kick anyone who is down. That, and the format of “newly broken ribs“, keeps them down, and that becomes the design of America. I’m so proud.

We are doing a few things right, however. We left all that “gangster rock” and similar evil pro-crime videos be on the TV and radio just long enough to encourage that type of genetics to think it had won something, so much of that genetics leaped forth and either killed off themselves and each other with drive-by shootings, drug overdoses, or AIDS from pushing themselves into too many people’s pants! At just about the right time, it was shown to officials that the point of diminishing returns was being reached, and nice kids were increasingly seeing this televised foul tradition somehow as correctness. So under a flag of “contributing to the delinquency of minors is a crime everywhere”, the rampant uglies were kicked off the small screen. Immediately, “cute” pirate films were desperately tossed onto the big screen, as the living creature of “piracy itself” which had been re-created, sought to preserve itself! An evil spirit, which you cannot reach out and touch, but it can reach out and touch you, the “Pirate” format has done more than just produce a design! We will see what happens next, in the resurgence of picarity, which means fixation on and imitation of “cute villains”.

In hunting, after all, this a hunting article (!), we know from eons of farming and ranching, that you use the best seed to seed the next crop, and the best-antlered, and healthiest well-developed bucks should be protected. They might have a difficult time seeding the next crop without their bodies and hung on a wall somewhere. Oh, yes, they are also dead. In nature, predators pulled down the weak and stupid, thus strengthening the herd’s genetics, and freedom from disease. Despite the growling, the balance of nature not only worked well, but had it’s good points as those cute little wolf cubs were fed, and the deer herd was often spared a species-specific disease ravagement. What wolves didn’t die from being poisoned, generally fled to Canada, where the land would only support a certain population of wolves, and soon there were no extras. Ya, de extras starved, eh? Dey didn’t know de terrain! Or dey all woulda got sick from de cold, and not enough grub.

So now we must take the wolves’ place around here, and pull down the sick and weak deer or they will overrun our crops. To do this, we hunt down the biggest and most developed prime buck genetics of the entire herd and kill it for it’s large antlers. The format is an antler hunt. The design is no antlers someday, and a lot of sick deer. I don’t see any cure for this.

I personally hunt only “management bucks”, large enough to see what they are going to be, but they have small rack genetics. That rare and magnificent rack on that throwback to deer herd genetics great-grandpa saw in his 30-30 iron sights, looks better on the hillside than on my wall, where it would only make me a target for anti-men types. So I do the right thing and practice actual sanity in game management. Most people do not either understand or agree, for various reasons. You shoulda let it grow another year! They’re all the same. And you shoulda used a 30-06, and the antlers would be bigger. Yeah, right.

All of which brings up format/perception issues in hunting, regarding the old trophy versus meat hunter debate. I see it as more than just an A-B choice, as many trophy hunters can only justify killing a beast if they plan to eat it. I was only about 8 years old, myself, when I was asked if I planned to eat that lice-covered sparrow I just had killed with my BB gun. That was hardly the last time I killed anything, but right then I knew I would make an effort to put to good use anything I killed, from then on, some kind of way, when reasonably possible. That works for me to this day. When I cannot deal with potential meat harvest to suit my values, I dig out my two digital cameras, one of them in 7-power binocular format, suited to distance shots on game, which I further digitally enlarge later, to make into a space-age trophy you can send through the internet! In the general case of trophy vs. meat motivation for hunting, I cannot tell whether it is the perception or the format which is creating the other. Especially when there is both trophy and meat going on! This one has turned the corner on me, where access function is Cosine, and 90 degrees makes an abrupt zero-crossing. Ask some kid with glasses what that means. Shooting glasses count too. Always wear eye protection, when it makes a difference!

Perception causing format causing design causing perception, can explain why so many hunters only know about and use the military calibers for hunting. Their major experience or exposure to guns was through the military, or through people of thus derivation. The heavily charged campfire debates over which non-military hunting calibers are so magically wonderful or so flipping awful, is easily displaced by misplaced patriotism, and endorsement of the mighty 30-06, or lately the 308, which matches the original 30-06 specs with those obsolete powders they had back then. These two Bull-moose guns, or should we say really reliable deer rifles, are the most used in the field, despite the obvious over-power mismatch to the game. They are perceived as appropriate technology for the purpose, by “accepted experts” everywhere. It has become for many a loyalty test to the culture and to the makers of magnum rifles, which the 30-06 and 308 are not even specifically included in magnum listings, except as a non-magnum option. The presented paradigm is that you need a magnum for everything, but if you are a wimp, the 30-06 or 308 can get by. Remember that the 30-30 in its prime was considered the overkill of the day, at 1/3 the power of an ’06! The design format is that perception is reality, and it is impolite to question it, mostly because it is difficult to even phrase it! What people in power agree upon this week, has always been ground into the public to perceive as sensible reality.

Well, I perceive it is time to end this format, within my design that these articles not get too long. I now return to whatever I was doing before I sat down to push the buttons on this one, as soon as I remember what that was.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors. #13. A Thread In Time.

No, this is not about repairing old sox. It is true that my grandmother showed me how to reweave old sox in square pattern to close the largest holes, and I have done it on both sox and jeans while out at sea, or on remote assignment. While a calming discipline, not right now.

The thread in time I speak of began about 35,000 years ago. Written records are a newfangled invention, relatively speaking, in this matter. Back before the last Ice Age, folks got by without a written language just fine. Modern humans existed by then, and leather clothing was just as hip and cool then as it is now. Woven textiles were coming into vogue for the avant garde and the wealthy, but leather processing was even better then, than it is typically today.

We use Chromic acid to break up the “glue” in natural leather. In today’s world of polymers, we usually don’t remember terms like Hide Glue, made from leather scraps, but a century ago it was the standard glue for gluing stuff. Mucilage was like dried gelatin, made from hooves, and known mostly for being wimpy. Anyway, getting the glue to not make dried leather so hard that a roll of it could serve as a hammer, was the challenge. It turned out that a light-end fractional distillation of plant resin from many resinous plants (the resins which evaporated at lower temperatures) would mix with the glue while still in the hide, and make it as supple as you could want.

The controlled temperatures would not char the woody stalks, and the hide would not therefore pick up any bad odors. The art has been forgotten, and primitives today using the resin technique, char the sticks and stink up the leather, because they saw it done that way. Moderns use Chromic acid, which dries and weakens the fancy furs, or Sulphuric acid, which makes the leather feel clammy even when it is dry. Polymers are also used, giving the leather a plasticy feel. The single drawback to the resin treatment is that it is water soluble, and will wash out, but can be restored. The point is that in cultural centers, folks didn’t have to look like cave people for wearing of the leather-based clothing. That was all so very long ago, and during the coming Ice Age people ate their old clothing, so simply none of it remains.

With no written languages, anybody in power anywhere had to employ people with especially good memories, who soon built up local discipline and tradition structures of their own. This was the same anywhere in the world, under anthropological uniformitarianism. The latter word is multidisciplinary, meaning a lot of stuff is the same everywhere, and has been going on for ages. In Geology, for example, it means that wind and water everywhere have always eroded rocks and always will. The members of the local memory guilds, or Mentats as some writers have called them lately, have much better data memories than I do. I would have probably been severely punished by the other Mentats, for my inability to remember data in precise minutiae, but I would be praised by engineer-types for my photographic memory of machinery and systems. I have always had to juggle those two, with one test calling me a fool and another calling me gifted on the same day! I don’t wish to trade with the Mentats, all types are needed to further confuse the issues.

But it is important to understand the universal human culture back then, to know by cross-empathy at a fundamental level, what racketeering opportunities existed everywhere by definition, and what permanent evil organizations therefore got started everywhere in human society, as the result. Then and now, all concentrations of power, and all dependence upon the incorruptibility of the compulsively corruptible, create margins for organized crime. If a food, wealth, or energy source exists, it is only a matter of time before something comes along to attempt to harvest it, as part of life in general is insatiability, and only in advanced societies is the concept of fair play available. Given that hypnosis has always existed in humans, as reptiles can be entranced and they pre-date mammals, brainwashing-based enslavement and indoctrination would naturally get high development, because there wasn’t a lot of other stuff to choose from, back in pre-history. They had tens of thousands of years to work this kind of stuff out, and they did so. Socially, it was all very tight, irrespective of where you were. The social factors leading to what we have just described, were the same everywhere, and generally so were the people, with only flavoring by local situations, so the end results were startlingly similar. Witness the pyramids by isolated groups. Bows and arrows replaced spears in isolated groups. Inter-tribe politics was the same everywhere. Anthropological Uniformitarianism.

And then the ice sheets came. Panic. They tried everything. “Obviously” the nature Gods were angry with mankind for making human stuff here and there, so every last bit of human culture stuff was got rid of. One can attempt to imagine the desperation and terror with which all artificial structures and artifacts of any kind, were made into dust. Anyone who did not support this worldwide-duplicated program fully was also made into dust. And then the finest specimens of anything nameable were sacrificed and made into dust. Then the worst specimens. Then anything unusual! Desperate people will do desperate things, and there was no shortage of it!

With all advancements erased, other than the crudest implements for the young to see and copy, everything backslid materially to caveman standards. People still talked a lot, as it left no evidence to anger the nature gods, and nonmaterial society continued, including the parasitic evil cults based upon racketeering, brainwashing, and collusion of minorities, whether real minorities or illusory in basis. But after many thousands of years of ice age, a purely evil central-yet-dispersed cult based upon raw power and hypnotic brainwashing, fortified with terror and poison against all opposition, was distilled and spread outward wherever it could go, in secrecy and enforced silence, covering the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Today some call them the Gnostic Axis Cult, or simply, the mob. And 35,000 years old this week!

As the ice sheets melted, no doubt aided by midnight bullock sacrifices and rattle-shaking, mankind was actually aided by there being any organizational structures at all, and because of the existence of this organized evil crimecult, agricultural projects were enforced by death to anyone who disturbed them, and therefore they successfully bore fruit. Similarly, these evil monsters poisoning all who failed to bow deeply or quickly enough, organized construction of boats, cities, and whatever else a growing culture needed. Everywhere that humans lived, the local dastards served the people with their brand of Hyper-Draconian leadership, which in sad truth, was the only thing which would work at that early time in human history, “Comply or Die!”

Mankind has emerged from such brutishness since then, and criminals are no longer needed to murder anyone who gets in the way of things. By 3000BC, many cultures were already espousing being nice people. The Egyptians spoke of “being light”, and early Hinduism was in full flower, later described as too good to be true, and therefore a “Sunday school“ type literary poem, much like the descriptions of biblical similar comic books, depicting real events in the Middle East. Somewhat later the Jews had the Mosiac Laws including the 10 Commandments, and Zoroaster was the happy hippy of the day, to mention but a few nice folks. At 5,000 years old, being nice folks is truly old fashioned!

Organized crime today is well aware of it’s early history, and even now many criminals believe it is their due to rule the world. They smugly point out how it was the Roman Caesars who got folks to plant in straight rows to increase erosion, Mussolini who stopped making the trains run late to appear as a successful leader, and Hitler who brought order to Germany by confiscating all firearms, to stop opposition to his march on Poland. These were all Gnostic Axis people. The overbearing style reveals a total absence of feedback in the regulatory governing process of forced compliance. Errors are made, and are forbidden to be mentioned. Such systems decay and collapse, from lack of an information feedback loop they need to function well. Any good regulator, whether electronic, mechanical, or governmental, must have an intact “correction information” feedback loop, by definition to function at all, as a universal principle of regulative operation. In modern politics, this is free speech and secret ballot voting, forming the feedback loop. It works reliably, without very many murders, usually. The secret ballot is absolutely necessary, because otherwise racketeering in the form of threats and brutal forms of intimidation, will become parasitic upon the entire system, increasing the width of the margin for racketeering to slip into and expand to encompass all available turf! The entire culture will tend to backslide into the old Hyper-Draconianism of Comply or Die. Recently Congress voted to eliminate secret ballot, for certain initial Union formation functions. Envision one person surrounded by burly enforcers of Union bosses’ wishes that he sign the card. The measure was Presidentially vetoed, but how did it get that far? Finger-pointing continues to the time of this writing.

So from the first ancient King’s assistant who was on the take, to the mob gas weapon midnight sprayers of today, a thread of evil sickness has woven in and out of human culture, originally making human culture possible, then progressive, and now simply sick. The cure is lots of fresh air, and the light of day for us all. I hope. But the fact is, many civil authority figures have already assumed the mob has already won except for wearing down a few resisters, and many community leaders have already sworn loyalty to the new order, which is actually the really old order.

Given modern high-tech gas weaponry in the hands of the same people who still remember the Nazis and some even are even today’s members, mixed with nuclear weapons for goon warlords to get into a “last man standing” situation with each other, some can make a case that the end of humans on earth is in sight. Like a “failed to survive their Technological Age” kind of thing. Others can make a case that since folks know all the facts by now, it doesn’t have to turn out that way. In truth, both sides can make a good case. One can visualize a running readout on the percentage as it differs from 50 - 50 %, as daily events tilt the balance. Truly this is the stuff of nightmares, and it is real. Many who see it all as out of their hands entirely, perhaps most of us, hope to delay the worst until after their own life span some way. Finally, something good about being old.

The SETI Project is revealing, about now. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is justified mathematically. Regardless of how you feather the numbers, we superficially should be hearing something, and the reason we are not is up for discussion. I think it has to do with how long a technological civilization survives access to the mixture of high tech assault gas weapons and nuclear weapons. In Earth’s case, it looks like it might be about 200 high tech years, before that “last man standing” scenario of warlord goons slugging it out, erases all higher forms of life on the planet. Estimating that it takes 2 billion years of evolution to produce the Crown of Creation somewhere, a sentient and engineering-talented species to get everyone into trouble, 200 / 2,000,000,000 = one ten millionth of the time spent broadcasting. I was forgiving in those number estimates, but you see my point how that reduces the chances of our hearing any neighbors in range. There have been lots of similar planets to Earth for some 10 billion years, and continuing. We didn’t all start at once. We are in the middle of the process, and there should be neighbors, but not a lot of chance of any in range. Run the numbers as you choose. That’s my take on it. But we are far from alone. There are lots of people right here!

If there are spaceships full of Aliens from time to time, I can’t blame them for avoiding contact. Clearly they have avoided blowing themselves to bits, and they want to study how we are about to do it to ourselves, to learn better how to keep avoiding what fate looms before the humans. And perhaps they have other reasons to poke around at us with long sticks. We might be relatives. One thing is certain, the Aliens which might or might not exist, don’t want to be found, for the very best of reasons. Right now they don’t resemble unstable Human Culture, and they want to keep it that way. If they exist!

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #14 Why Communism Won’t Work.

This would come under the hunt for clarity, moreso than freedom, because many systems short on freedom have, in fact, worked at all. So the hunt for freedom is a larger matter, for many other articles, as it should be. Since Chinese Communism has always been in flux, and Cuban Communism has always been largely a personality-charisma cult, let us use the old Soviet Communism as our handy punching bag. An average between Marx, Stalin, and Lenin works for me in this. Later leaders tried to various degrees to alter things in a patchwork fashion, to cover for the intrinsic flaw, which we will poke at with a long stick!

“From each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs.” To a Centrist like myself, this sounds like pure Leftism, but to Russian Serfs, starving and kept in squalor and disadvantagement by the Czars (a term derived from Caesars), it sounded like a very good deal, along with the classless society, Socialist redivision of all the wealth, and the banning of all forms of decadence. The excesses of the Czars had them pretty grossed out, and almost ready to order a trainload of French guillotines! They did use a few of them, anyway.

But, the fact that nobody below ruling class was even literate, and if the literate were banished there would be no one to run the country, an arrangement had to be formed wherein the very same people who had been the oppressors would be allowed to stay, contingent upon following the new rules. This completely necessary deal with obvious devils, was to collide squarely with the flaw in the more or less technically perfect system of Soviet Socialist Democracy.

The flaw is achingly obvious right now, if you take just a moment to see the Rhino in the room. Let us take one moment to do so. The helpless illiterate serfs were depending on known elitist criminals to oversee all the money, property, and everything else. Imagine a wrecking ball hitting a building with people in it, as symbolic of the kind of fairness one could expect! This same flaw creates itself wherever Communism tries to exist in human culture, as we will see, but it actually started out that way in 1917 New Russia!

In order for a person to rise in the hopelessly corrupt and fakey system that the serfs were now ruled by, to the level of being Commissar, that person could seldom be describable as a nice and fair individual. The system could not only not improve, by definition, but it was also a crime to criticize it, also by definition. There was no feedback loop of any sort of correction function, in the system of regulation, which was now in the hands of criminals. If anyone went so far as to vote for a reform party other than the one in power, that person would find themself at the back of every line, for food, shelter, medicine, you name it. So the normal feedback loop in a Democracy of free speech and secret ballot voting, was offline permanently. Functional Self-sustaining Latchup. There were a few populist heroes like “early Yeltsin” and Gorby, but such figureheads were in the end more like hood ornaments, with roaring and barely controllable forces right beneath them.

So now we look at this in terms of how it might, or might not, have been saved, if somehow we could force the changes and see if it “took”, similarly to a spreadsheet program. As we twirl the enchanted chicken’s foot, we substitute in both ordinarily honest clerks to run Mother Russia, and enough literate serfs so that they could know whether they were being robbed outright. In a few years, the temptation to corruption by the unreviewed work environment, would have shifted things into what always happens in such cases, corruption. And in the real Russian model, literacy was quickly taught to folks, so they could read the works of Karl Marx, and the literacy didn’t help a lot after things got calcified in just a few years. In a short time they could read, and it didn’t help. So much for those possible changes taking hold. Not with “the flaw” still in place (no review function). The base assumption that since Communism was a mathematically perfect system, that Humans were therefore also perfect, proved to be thunderously non-sequitor (it did not properly follow). Humans, being basically bad monkeys who know better, usually require review to keep them honest, profit motive to keep them active, and both to stimulate interest in self-improvement. We live and learn, or at least some of us do. The flaw is that while Communism is perfect, there are no perfect people to run it, in an imperfect world to begin with, which necessitates a functioning review system, or parasitism will eat everyone‘s lunch.

After Reagan forced the Soviets to spend treasure on Star Wars, which they couldn’t afford, and the Soviet economy therefore collapsed, along with their local version of Communism, the new open-ness and restructuring (glasnost & perestroika) changed the landscape as much as the breakup of the old empire. Pure Democracy had been used as a tool of oppression to keep captured countries in line, and to remove the rights of minorities. Now Representative Democracy with genuine secret ballots, free speech, and shameless decadent Capitalist profit motive, offered a whole lot of people everything that they had seen or heard of on international television. One would think that, if anything, would stick. But take another look, while sitting down.

The Russians are slowly creeping back into the old ways of limited freedom. I avoid scratching my head over it, as I assume this increases baldness. Is it force of social-economic habit? Did the Czars pick up on some subtle enslave-ability of the Serfs? I suspect language itself as a partial cause for reluctance to change.

It is similar that many French teachers initially instruct their new students in learning the French language, that you cannot simply code things into French words in many cases, because attitudes and styles are involved a lot, and what is often meant in a French phrase is something French, which won’t translate as what it means, either direction, into any other language. The best example of this is “to pass”. In French thinking, this great gateway passes you. Be this as it may regionally, words shape thoughts, and therefore perception.

In Soviet Russian, the word for Sir was a forbidden word, because it was a classless society, that is to say, without class distinctions or levels. Supposedly. Communist party members were in a distinctly higher class than non-members, but it was considered classy to not mention it. Tovarich means comerade, and you were required to use that term. There was no private ownership, but a vector of issuedness could be pointed at you. “At me”, this Ruble in my pocket! “At me“, this room my family lives in, etc. Tables were considered decadent, as all kinds of wicked things happened on tables, but you could have an “elevated work surface”! No kidding, if you said “Sir, that’s my pencil on the table“, you just broke three laws! The Rooskies will be cleaning crap like this, and a lot of other subtle stuff as well, out of their language probably forever, and it will hold or push them in wrongful ways every day while they do it. How big of a link in anyone’s chains, simple word-pressure is, can be slippery to get a line on, since we must see such a thing from inside of itself, unless we are learning a foreign language, perhaps.

I think it is important to understand exactly why Communism won’t work, even though clearly we are still guessing at parts of it. This is an investigation touching on how Democracy can become monstrous if improperly applied, how evil destroys itself eventually because of its flaws, and how fragile and easily manipulated our very self-images are. In this Age of Information, we can’t afford to lose what we have suffered so much to learn, because information alone can save us now.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #15. A New Plan For Cast Bullets.

You know the “old bind” situation, where it takes enough of one thing to get workability, that it screws up something else you need? So you end up toying with only screwing up both just a little? That dog sleeps in the doorway, if you’re talking the hardness of cast bullets!

At magnum handgun hunting velocities, if you have a soft enough alloy for the bullet’s hollowpoint to expand to optimum diameter to transfer hydrostatic shock to the protoplasmic target, it is also soft enough to smear lead deposits all over your barrel’s rifling grooves in less than one box of shell’s use, utterly destroying accuracy. Gas check bullets only partly fix this. (A gas check resembles a brass bottle cap, crimped to the bottom of a lead bullet. The theory of operation is to prevent gas leakage which is theorized to occur by melting a path up the side of the bullet, and melting off a layer off the bottom of the bullet. But neither one is much of a problem, and mostly the harder-than-lead brass just scrapes off some of the deposits of lead! This lets lead deposits form, but not get worse than pretty much awful). Harder alloys can fix the leading problem, but there goes your optimum expansion on impact. People play hardness against velocity, against lore and lubricants, against bullet design, against psychological preference, and so on. Starting with, dwelling on, or finishing with any one of these features or concerns, leads back to all the others in a joyous tug-of-war and see-saw balance. All of which ends with the original problems and uncertainty coming full circle. Below 1000 feet per second (fps), leading is not a severe problem, but this is not Magnum velocity hunting, either. A typical 1000 fps load zeroed at 100 yards, would be 4 ½ inches high at 50 yards, and down below line of sight 15 inches at 150 yards. In the 1870’s people hunted deer just fine with 44-40 revolvers doing exactly that. Sitting over a deer trail then and now often gets you a 40 yard opportunity. That is 450 ft-lbs of energy at the muzzle of the gun. I like 750 to 800 ft-lbs energy for a fast put-down. So I usually use jacketed bullets, at that power level. But jacketed bullets might get really scarce, if politics goes sour, so I have been known to play the cast bullet hardness game to see what I can do, with more personal ingenuity, than shop support, which can disappear overnight.

Some say that is the charm of cast bullets, that you have lots of things in common to talk about with others facing the same merry-go-round. As fun as that is, I have a way to get results by viewing the situation in what may be a new way for some people. I suggest in this method to totally put the cart before the horse, to see what that turns up, by starting with the answer, and seeing what might have led to that.

Most African nations have agreed that a .400” hole through the vitals is lethal on the world’s most opinionated game! Of course that hole is assumed to have been made by projectiles moving at rifle velocity, but a really fast brace and bit would have a definite negative effect on vital organs as well. We will blithely substitute in the somewhat lower magnum handgun velocity, balanced by shorter handgun range for higher retained velocity and energy, and let’s say an increase to either .430” or .452”, that is, 44 or 45 Calibre, for use on ordinary-sized thin-skinned game like deer. Even larger calibres may be toyed with, under this plan, as well. We make a big, wide, hard-alloy bullet, which has no leading problems, and is big enough to not need to expand on impact, using large calibre revolvers, meant for big game hunting at full magnum power on factory jacketed bullets. We will use the hardcast bullets as described at midrange velocity for controllability, on ordinary deer, at well over the traditional 1870 power levels. It works.

The widest flat front on the bullet (meplat) we can find is a good idea, to transfer hydrostatic shock to the target. If we want more penetration, instead of a smaller meplat, we can also consider a longer, heavier bullet, with the tradeoff being greatly increased recoil to screw up our aim. The longer bullet would have better penetration of the air as well, but conversely, at the shorter handgun range, that is not nearly as important as it would be using rifles at long range. So a shorter hardcast bullet with a wide flat front seems to be emerging, launched at high velocity, for shorter handgun hunting ranges, typically in two-handed standing hold, quickly deployed.

The Midway USA catalog has lots of pictures from several popular bullet mould manufacturers, so for convenience I refer to them. Lee molds (spell it any way you like) are the cheapest, and quickest to use. Just dip a corner of the aluminum block in the molten lead alloy to heat it up to operating temperature. The 200 grain RN Flatpoint in 44 Calibre looks interesting. At only 200 grains in weight, you can scoot it right along with minimal recoil at magnum power levels. For example, at 1400 feet per second (fps) you have 870 ft-lbs of energy, about like a 41 Magnum in power, and certainly enough for a large Whitetail at handgun range. The “1000 ft-lb minimum for deer” refers to 22 centerfire rifles used at long range, where tiny bullets depend on high energy to do the job. Our bullet here is more than 3 times the size of those little 22 pills. Also, the 1400 fps on just about any handgun bullet gets us a +/- 3 inch trajectory out to 120 yards or more, which is as far as most good handgunners can hit an 8 inch paper plate at from a standing two-handed hold in less than 3 seconds, which is a realistic maximum range situation for walking around the sagebrush, average 40 yard handgun deer hunting in the ambush style (fair chase). I use the harder lead alloys intended for rifle bullets which aren’t expected to expand on the target for this, to be free from excess leading problems, however we still have to clean the gun sometimes, whether using lead-alloy or cupro-nickel jacketed bullets. Gas checks limit but don’t stop leading. Again, mostly they just scrape out lead deposits, and prevent only the minor melting of bits of lead from the bullet’s base.

In 45 Calibre, Lee offers both a 160 grain special design, and 200 grain RN Flatpoint designs. I would consider the 160 to be experimental, but both are 45 Calibre, which is big stuff even with a super light experimental bullet, remembering that the deer are thin-skinned, and usually not hard to kill with proper bullet placement, like centering the lungs, a large target. In Lyman, both of the 200 grain 45 Cal bullets have the “look” we’re after. In RCBS, the 44 and 45 Cowboy molds, and the 185 grain 45 Cal all look interesting for this use. All of these bullets can be launched by any magnum-framed gun to hunting velocity, which actually starts around 1100 fps with the heavier bullets, which recoil heavily, and have drooping trajectories. This entire plan I now describe, is based upon lighter, big diameter flatnose (“pre-expanded“) bullets at elevated velocity to magnum power levels. The Ruger Blackhawk series is magnum-framed, the 445 Supermagnum is 44 Calibre, and the awesome 454 Casull is 45 Calibre, keeping it all in focus.

If the gun available is an ordinary replica 45 Colt Peacemaker, only intended for standard load pressures, do so. Use exactly what the reloading manuals recommend, both for bullet choice and powder charge levels, hold back the hunting range to the usual 40 to 75 yards most deer are taken at anyway, and you are exactly situated with what worked just fine on deer for your Great-Great-Grandfather! Don’t hunt with the special Cowboy Action light loads, as those are usually intended for target work by nice folks who usually haven’t had time to train up for accurately shooting the higher hunting loads, which some guns are capable of. The hunting loads are usually up to the highest power loads listed for the specific gun you are shooting, matched to the intended game. Midrange 44 Magnum loads are fine for average deer! If in doubt, ask a gunsmith what you have, which listings apply to it, and if it needs anything, like a good trigger job which can dramatically improve your shooting accuracy on live game, which is more humane, by resulting in fewer marginal hits. If you are not knowledgeable concerning exact firearm identification, have a gunsmith tell you what you have, before loading it up for modern hunting levels of power, which could destroy both a collector’s item and the hand holding it!

By word of explanation, a standard 38/.357” jacketed handgun bullet fully expanded on the target, will often measure around 44 or 45 Calibre. Since we are getting tricky here, using a magnum-framed big bore gun capable of containing heavy hunting loads, and selecting a cast bullet we can make using rifle-hardness alloy to prevent barrel leading, at the same diameter it would be if a standard-sized bullet were actually expanded on a target, light in weight enough to launch at Magnum power velocity without stirring up unpleasant levels of recoil, it all works out. Everything is balanced within it’s intended use on short range thin-skinned game of up to 200 lb size, with good bullet placement. The old Lyman #2 rifle bullet alloy, supposedly 6% Antimony, and 2% Tin, with 92% lead, should work as well as it always has. Beware the poisonous fumes from melting lead, and especially poisonous fumes from melting battery plate to have a source of Antimony for hardness. Wheel weights often have steel chips in them, but they float out if you add radio solder for the flux and tin content. Two meltings/fluxings/pourings between containers, like tin cans, are required to protect your barrel from the steel chips in the dross, but that does a good job of separating the steel chip-infested crud from the gleaming molten pour.

Since barrel-leading when using rifle alloy at only 1400 fps shouldn’t be a serious problem, I don’t see the need for gas-checked bullets. However, if your barrel is a bit rough for some reason, like micropitting from corrosion, you might have to use gascheck-type bullets all the time for all shooting activities. I have had good luck using a lube made from 50% Molybdenum Disulphide based chassis lube mixed with 50% Bee’s wax. I was using this before anybody heard of MoS2 use in shooting. People at first said it wouldn’t work “because” they hadn’t heard of anyone doing that. Then as more people tried it and watched their problems disappear, the technique gained permission to work!

Since most of my hunting over the years has been with jacketed bullets, I haven’t had nearly as much opportunity to explore the pre-expanded hardcast bullet technique as I would like, or it deserves. My interest in cast bullets has largely been from paranoia every time “they” talk about taxing bullets, which has been several times by now! In light of that, wheelweights and battery plates might be a lot easier to get than a box of JHP’s, one of these days. Anybody seen my wheelweight pliers? Regards

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 16 Maurice’s Sister.

First, let me say that both Maurice and his sister Helga, are fictional constructs of several real people I have known, whom I hope won’t sue me! No one person is more than a quarter of a character, so I think I am safe. The scenario I describe actually did happen in its parts to real people I have known over the years, most of whom don’t know each other, but not enough of it happened to any one person for me to get into too much trouble. Of course, I changed the names! As I dive for cover, here’s what “happened”, as I splice people and their lives together with only the finest duct tape!

Maurice took after his petite Mother, and Helga took after her large, stout, and robust Father. The only reason Helga didn’t mop the floor with Maurice’s head, was because she disliked housework. Maurice, conversely, actually enjoyed a clean and orderly house, and would do that kind of chores whenever Helga was not around to ridicule him for it.

The family wasn’t wealthy, and Maurice didn’t seem the type to get very much into hunting, so when they were both old enough, only a year apart, and ready for their introduction into deer hunting, Papa only bought one rifle for the two of them to share. It was a Savage in 7mm Remington Magnum. His 338 Winchester Magnum was too much gun to start children on. If Maurice proved to be the hunter, the Savage could be easily rebarreled in their garage shop to 264 Winchester Magnum. And if Helga took over things, 300 Winchester Magnum.

As it turned out, Helga found she could “get by” with the 154 grain bullets, which when she yanked the trigger and missed the deer completely, there was a satisfying recoil kick and no messy deer carcass to have to deal with! Maurice, on the other hand, had been reading the reloading manuals about history and variety of firearms, and found he could download to 60 grains of his Father’s favorite powder, Winchester WMR, for about 2800 fps on the 139 grain bullet. This was about halfway between the 7mm Mauser and the 280 Remington in power, was pleasant to shoot, and was certainly adequate for even Mule deer with good hits! Maurice became a studied master at outwitting even the wariest of deer, and a most sanitary artist at cleaning them.

Papa was overjoyed by all this! Helga began to get jealous. She obtained a Savage 300 Magnum barrel and installed it herself, using the 7mm Magnum barrel for trade-in at the local gunshop and renting their Savage barrel nut wrench for the day. When Maurice saw what had been done, he became strangely silent, and then he smiled. He knew what to do. He got some Hornady #3021 bullets, interlocked for hunting use, and designed for non-magnum velocity, and a pound of IMR-3031 powder. He loaded 56 grains of 3031 to a chronographed 2800 fps at the local range, to duplicate the energy of a 300 Savage, at the additionally reduced recoil of a lighter bullet, for use only on deer. Papa saw all this and silently thanked God for resourceful and capable children.

At 2800 fps, Maurice had all the trajectory he could possibly use, and the 130 grains was similar to a 270 top load, at bigger footprint and almost the same velocity. Everyone criticized his choices, but it worked very well, didn’t stir up a lot of recoil, and didn’t make a mess of the meat. The fast-burning IMR-3031 made just enough noise and muzzle flash that most folks didn’t even catch on that Maurice was cheating the recoil monster. The loaded rounds didn’t look much different from the full-house Magnums, and Helga bided her time to slip one into Maurice’s ammo pack, and smugly waited.

Maurice detected a change in Helga’s body language, and put two and two together. He weighed all his ammo, and put a subtle mark on his “good ones”. He shot the planted round swing-held from the hip into the ground, while alone, and never said a word about it. As far as anyone knows, Helga is still waiting to see the bruised shoulder which never came. (End of fiction.) Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 17 So What’s For Deer?

What cartridge to use on deer, is possibly the most well-worn topic ever, for campfire discussion, that has regularly caused umbrage among good friends.

At it’s mere mention, the 30-06 contingent leaps forth, possibly knocking things into or out of the campfire, maintaining that because the ‘06 won two world wars, it should be the one selected for the honor of harvesting deer! There has to be something to this, for so many people to feel that this honored ordnance, capable of dispatching large moose, and grizzly bears with the 200 to 220 grain roundnose bullets, be selected for use on mere deer.

The large, unnecessary recoil generated by the excess of power (for mere deer) on the big 180 grain moose bullets, in this service intended to expand little at sub-300 Magnum velocities, which is intended to limit trophy destruction thereby, and on rear presentations penetrate all the way up to the vitals in the chest, while all that gut juice makes the meat taste “gamey”, is seen as a manly mulekick, and completely proper in terms of respect. Respect for what is never completely clear, but no one doubts that respect is somehow deeply involved, and to question it is clearly disrespect. Mentioning the increased training time requirement to do acceptable work while overbracing for impact, is proof of unmanliness, to those so involved.

At this time I say with utmost respect, let all this be as it may. And please pass the ketchup. If you examine what people thought was correct for deer harvesting before all those WWII surplus Springfields were given up to the public, a totally different picture emerges. Preface to this delvement, we must point out the many deer brained in the back yard by 22 rimfire carbines during the Great Depression. This act to feed one’s starving family at that time, took on every bit as much sanctity as the ritual use of the 30-06 on deer has today. The Prohibition-Depression Years were characterized by bottles and brained deer! The Depression was caused by world-wide drought (the dust bowl years) and allowing stock to be purchased such that it’s increase in value paid the financing payments on it. If the stock stayed even, the investor was in trouble, or possibly ruined if they couldn‘t find buyers for a partial selloff, to cover the latest payment before foreclosure! The practice was quickly outlawed, but has lately been smugly restored, along with automatic shutdown of trading if things got too tense (as though that would change anything), and the Millennium crash resulted right after the shock of 9-11, which as bad as it was, wouldn‘t have caused a properly run stock market to meltdown. The practice of “buying on margin” still continues to this day. And yes, even though I am allergic to most solvents and don’t drink them, I can see where prohibition of alcohol was depressing for people used to the Roaring Twenties, and this no doubt deepened the recovery requirements for the nation. Plus, it brought nice people into begging contact with organized crime in a lasting way, which the nation has yet to recover from. Let this not be as it may.

Contrast the possible multiple hit requirement of the 22 rimfire backyard scenario, with what eventually happens to just about every deer hunter. The deer moves just as you are shooting, or something else happens, and the shot placement is not as perfect as it might have been. Also, some deer are real fighters, and what should have been a 50 yard run turns into a half-mile run through thorn brambles! And several wet ditches! Somebody with a 30-06 is patting their gun right now, and murmuring “use enough gun”. Another guy with a 45-70 says “yep”.

Granted, anyone not physically able to chase down the occasional “runner” this week, had obviously better use some kind of real “stopper”. This is likely a big bore gun of some kind, whether rifle or pistol, 44 Calibre or larger, although good hits from my 243 with the 100 grain Nosler Partition bullet have never ever let a deer get farther than 40 yards! Good hits from my 44 and 45 calibre Magnum handguns have never allowed even a 10 foot run. I think the reason other people sometimes get long runs on good hits, is because they take a long time to shoot, and the animal’s blood becomes “50% adrenaline“. With a “charged up” deer like that, anything can happen! Things have gone wrong for me on more than one occasion, and I wound up with a bad hit and a long blood trail. I question if a bigger calibre than I was using any of those times would have helped. A bad hit is a bad hit, and if you hunt long enough, things will sometimes go wrong. In the case of high recoil making a person be distracted from aiming or trigger squeeze as good as they might have, the higher power is not guaranteed to compensate for the bad hit one might not have made with a more suitably balanced amount of gun for the intended game. On the other hand, there are people who take elk with a 243 and Nosler Partition bullets, just to prove it can be done. As much as I like the 243, I am not comfortable with it’s use as an elk stopper.

I am used to put-down kills with my T/C Contender in 45 Long Colt, using the Sierra 240 grain jacketed hollow cavity bullets about 1200 to 1250 fps, which is about 800 ft-lbs of energy, just short of 41 Magnum specs. I get flat trajectory +/- 3 inches, out to 120 yards or so. Which is as far as I will risk a two-handed standing ambush shot out in the sagebrush, that being the limit I can reliably hit an 8” paper plate at that way. Usually, shots are at 50 to 75 yards, or so, which I feel very good about. The JHC bullet described is intended for regular 45 Colt velocity, and the expansion at twice that power level is spectacular. Penetration is only about 10 inches, but that’s 4 inches wide! You have no trouble putting your fist in well past your wrist, if that’s your idea of a good time. Once I was accompanied by a girlfriend who had left medical school because she couldn’t handle the blood. She saw me do that, actually for her benefit, and tried it herself. The hair stood up on the back of her neck, and she shortly later re-entered the medical profession.

The 250 Savage defined modern deer hunting. The old 25-35 had proven to be just enough gun with the big bullets to take well-hit deer out to 150 yards, but ran out of steam at that point, and some said before that! Ethically, this was cutting it a little close, as not all hunters were experts, and some deer are larger than others. Necking down the 25-35 to create the 22 Savage High Power added to the confusion. The light 70 grain or so bullets didn’t penetrate as much as one would have liked, at distances they shouldn’t have usually been fired from, having only 1400 ft-lbs of energy at the muzzle, and often used on elk because someone took the name High Power too literally! But the 250 Savage had a bit more steam, and that should have fixed everything. However, the marketing people thought a lighter 87 grain bullet at the then unheard-of 3000fps velocity would sell more guns, which it did. Oops! The lighter bullet experienced some spectacular failures on larger deer species, like Mule deer, elk, and Canadian whitetail. Then Western Ammo came out with a 100 grain load which worked fine on all known regular deer species, with good hits. The practical minimums for deer hunting were now solidly established! The 250 Savage 100 grain bullet had at it’s 200 yard demonstrated usability limit, 2200 fps remaining, which was a bit over 1000 ft-lbs, which was exactly the same as the energy retained by the old 25-35 at 150 yards. This refers to anchoring Mule deer and such. Applying this standard to 22 centerfire boomers, 1000 ft-lbs delivered to the target will only reliably put down average deer. At 35 Calibre, a 357 Magnum handgun with 400 ft-lbs energy remaining will solidly stop a well-hit average deer. At 44 or 45 Calibre, a hole that size is lethal in deer vitals however it gets made, even with brace and bit! Many people have since come up with various formulas for computing lethality, taking all these variables into account, perhaps the Hatcher Index being the best known, but even it is so highly contested, nobody really knows what to believe aside from the specifics we just mentioned. I feel perhaps the largest factor is how long one takes to make the shot!

By well-hit, I usually refer to a quickly taken broadside centered lung hit. For some reason, deer seem to like standing broadside, perhaps to get a good look at you, already half turned away, for a quick escape. No comment on that at this time. Not many people owned 30-06’s for hunting until after WWII. The 30-30 was the weapon of choice for deer before color movies came out. The 30 calibre footprint with heavy bullets was all you needed in the woods, period, where you couldn’t even see 150 yards most of the time. It was the overkill of the day, and at pleasant recoil levels, one third of a 30-06 kick. Contrast this picture with a modern deer safari out West, where you are shown rapidly departing deer already spooked by hunting season, at 350 yards and looking smaller by the minute! As you clutch your 25-06 or 256 Magnum a little tighter, the guide driving the jeep says he thinks you can get you a little closer!

You remember Gramps telling how the game was plentiful and not spooked back in 1910, when there were a lot of “old guns” lying around, from the trusty old 44-40 Winchester to the elitist 38-55 Ballard, both deadly on deer in the woods. Anyone who couldn’t hunt with a 30-30 didn’t deserve to, as that was the prime choice of ordnance! Now more than half the entries in a reloading manual can be used to hunt deer just fine. I guess it all depends on what your definition of a Golden Age is. How about right now?

So in conclusion, I have to say whatever the individual ends up with which does the job, is the conclusion. Many times I have had to make do with a different weapon than I wanted to, for one reason or another, and enjoyed success anyway. Or gone out with exactly what I wanted to use, and no game was available, stalkably close enough for a shot! Socrates said the race is not always won by the swiftest, nor the wrestling match by the strongest, but luck and having a good day happens to everybody. Of course, good luck often is where preparation meets opportunity, just not always! I personally try to slant the odds in my favor within the limits of fair chase in the deer fields, with equipment choice and technique, which includes study, training and practice. Still, I feel the better part of being a hunter, is simply being a hunter. Even if it means digging through a few reloading manuals to see what is what. We know what energy levels are needed for what size game at what distance, and the books these days spell it out, often excessively conservatively, if not paranoid of lawsuits, which we can correct for. It’s all part of being a hunter to wade through obstructions and trials of all kinds, including seductive lore leading in oblique directions, or genuine facts leading to better technique, and learning to tell the difference.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 18. Electric Power / 12 VDC Inverters.

The newer inverters are a lot better than the old inverters, from the 1980‘s, and many from the 1990‘s. It seems like we’re saying that sort of thing a lot these days, and the bottom line on that is possibly one might weigh advances which both lowered cost and improved efficiency and power, against the “usual reasons for buying a used unit in good shape“, e.g. availability and low cost. The new inverters are so cheap, sophisticated, and powerful compared to the old inverters, that older large and clunky designs are seldom a good deal at any price.

But just buying a new unit is not by itself a guarantee against having problems. You can easily get into trouble if you don’t understand a few facts “they” don’t often tell you about. Sales people seldom know very much about what they’re selling, these days, and what we are usually told is the quickly picked up lore they heard “vocal” customers say, not always the very best source of true info. They are typically paid minimum wage to tell people whatever will get stuff out the door, and anything better than that is the isolated result of someone’s good upbringing. Low idle current, good dynamic pulse-width regulation, and rare-earth high permeability cores, are what you should ask about, but it is a safe bet no one will have any idea what you are talking about, except possibly the low idle current by the best people. You must know what you need and how to use it, or roll dice loaded against you. You can still buy a cruddy inverter with shiny packaging, or buy a good one and misjudge matching everything to everything else, in it’s installation and use. Here is a crash course in not screwing that up.

It takes all of our hunter’s instinct and stealthy ways to end up with what will work the best for us. We must find ways to escape from marketing people who consider us “the hunted”, who could care less if we flatten our RV’s deep-cycle “appliances” battery 3 or 4 times as fast as need be, 50 miles the other side of that clump of trees! Larger or poorly designed smaller inverters tend to pull a significant amount of idle current when hooked up to the 12 volt source, even when there is no load switched on, and plugged in on their 120vac output. I checked the specs on a brand new small 100 watt inverter for idle current, and found that it would completely flatten a typical RV deep-cycle battery in 5 days, with nothing at all plugged into the 120vac output receptacle! I did not buy that inverter! Here’s the math. The inverter’s idle current was about 200 milliamps, or 0.2 AMPS. A 65 AMP-HOUR RV deep-cycle battery having been charged and discharged a few times, will only hold about 20 AMP-HOURs of power when it is warm, less when cold. The 0.2 amps times 24 hours in a day, equals 4.8 AMP-HOURs of power consumed by idle current in a day by that inverter, doing nothing but sitting there, hooked to the battery! In 5 days, that’s 24 AMP-HOURs, which more than kills the battery flat.

One would hope that a large inverter would not have much more idle current than this, but the dual points are made that (1) it is a good idea to have two inverters, a large one for big loads, and an efficient smaller one for smaller loads, and (2) have all inverters on separate 12 volt disconnect switches, so all idle currents can individually be turned off.

Modified Sine Wave, means voltage-regulated by pulse-width modulation. Adding a resonant circuit to this makes actual sine wave out of it, which sometimes will help certain appliances, but usually you simply don’t need it, and Modified Sine wave will work just fine. Don’t even consider getting a big inverter which is not either modified Sine wave or actual Sine wave, for any serious application. Some of the little 75 Watt cig-liter inverters don’t say what they are, or what their idle current is, but that’s not a serious installation, either. I have one of those mystery cig-liter models hard-wired in, and to a 120 volt 15 watt VCR in my RV, but it is seldom used and has its own separate disconnect switch. Between the “seldom-used” and the “separate disconnect switch”, it works out. Otherwise, it would likely not, no matter how cheap it was.

One must use adequate-gauge-sized electric cables, when hooking the inverters up to the deep-cycle battery. The literature which came with the inverter should mention minimum wire gauge sizes, which should be the next size larger, which is numerically a smaller number, if you are going farther than a few feet. Also one should use a “splitter” which contains big semiconductor diodes, to hook up to the alternator’s output terminal, and split it’s output to go two separate ways; to the starting battery, and to the deep-cycle battery for your appliances. This way, the starting battery will only run down when you leave the headlights on to clean that deer in darkness and cool, which also means no flies in your face! Aside from this, you can use the deep-cycle appliance battery down to where the appliances stop functioning, and still have a fresh starting battery, to start the engine and run out of gas charging the deep-cycle, unless you wisely installed the very biggest alternator you could fit onto your vehicle engine, typically more than 100 Amps, to get the job done in reasonable time!

Carry an extra 5 gallon gas can, or two! And a CB or HAM radio to call for even more gas, when that runs out. Tell people right up front you will pay their expenses to deliver supplies such as gas to your location, or they might have radio receiver failure! An amazingly high percentage of stranded folks somehow think everyone owes them free gas once they leave the pavement. Woods folk had to consume their own gas to bring their gas can in for their own needs, and now will have to use up more gas to go back to town and get more gas right away, which easily more than quadruples it’s total cost. I have heard stranded people out on backwoods CB at first expecting to be served, then offering to pay pump price, then offering cash bounty on can gas delivered, higher and higher before someone claimed they just got in and turned on the radio! I have even heard other people send stranded folks to yet another neighbor, volunteering all that neighbor’s can gas at pump price, and then seen that neighbor not answer their radio and drive by on the dirt road from their darkened cabin! Bring enough gas.

Use #8 gauge wire between alternator, splitter, and deep-cycle battery bank of possibly two or three batteries in parallel, of about the same age, or perhaps all of them on their own “disconnect“ knife switches. Alternatively, one can run manual, and I have, and simply put #8 wire directly from the alternator’s big output terminal to a big knife switch, and from there #8 to the various positive terminals of the battery bank. Connect all their negative terminals together and grounded to chassis near where their location is. The drawback is that if you get distracted or overtired and forget to hit the “disconnect” knife switch(s) after pulling into a stopping place, your normal appliance usage can flatten your starting battery, which is likely not a deep-cycle type, and it’s life will be greatly shortened by being deep-cycled one single time. And you may well be looking for those old jumper cables, and scraping the corrosion off the teeth to get a good contact on that guy’s battery who said he would be back in a day or so! I always solder my jumper cable wires to their end-clamps. A corroded crimp onto good wire is the same as inadequate wire gauge or no wire at all! You can use acid core solder if you wash it off afterwards, and the acid helps cut through existing corrosion for the soldering job. Radio type rosin core solder works too, but you may have to scrape all surfaces bright first.

I usually try to keep a spare deep-cycle battery charged up and waiting in it’s bucket, for whatever it may be needed for. More than once this has saved my own bacon, and sometimes that of a friend, as modern deep-cycle batteries work just fine for starting vehicles as well as for their stated purpose. I keep a 12 foot long #12 twisted “extension cord” for it, with insulated clamp fittings on both ends and a blade-type 20 Amp fuse built into the red wire, to make a complete tent-type power station. The rectangular bucket easily lashes onto a standard pack frame. I use the power for whatever, plus a UHF/VHF Ham Radio station. 5 Watts on the higher frequencies goes a long way line of sight, from good campsite selection, plus I made a portable full-size lightweight “ground plane-type” wire antenna to throw a weighted line over a high tree branch and haul it up 20 feet off the ground for maximum range. This type Ham Radio license is so darn easy to get, well, contact the ARRL on the web and see.

I have shared campfire with many knowledgeable deep-cycle battery users, who have recommended setting the adjustable voltage regulator anywhere from 14.2 Volts to 15.0 Volts. I have found that older batteries often need the 15.0 Volts to get a full charge into them in a reasonable time. Conversely, new batteries seem to prefer 14.6 Volts maximum, even at high current charging input. I use a digital voltmeter and separate disconnects when charging batteries of different ages. That’s what works for me, and I am a relentless control freak. Someone else might prefer to use batteries all in parallel of assorted age, set the finish voltage at 14.4, measured at the batteries, and just smile a lot. That works too, but might take longer.

Only use distilled water in your batteries, or deionized water. Tap or spring, or even rain water (dust, nitrates) all have stuff in them which degrades your electrolyte function. Every second or third good top-up, use actual acid mix from a battery company. Or distilled water with a level teaspoon of Anhydrous Cadmium Sulfate powder per entire battery, not per cell, on a 24-series sized battery. A little more for the 27-series, being somewhat bigger, assuming any chemical company will sell you a harmless battery additive, these days. You may have to order it through somebody. The Cadmium is better, but regular acid is more available.

Miscellaneous notes. Your batteries will last longer if you don’t take them so far down that you have to charge them to get the inverters to work again, and certainly not all the way flat. Don’t expect that 8 Amp dc output on your 120vac generator to charge your batteries very fast. Conversely, if you are going to run the generator anyway, don’t miss out on that 8 Amps going into your batteries almost for free! A 120 Amp alternator on normal out-of-gear fast idle (or a little faster) is about right to charge 1, deep-cycle 27 series battery. Several batteries in parallel take proportionately longer, or higher idle speed. Watch out for much faster charge rates than this, as they can become relatively inefficient, and may somewhat shorten battery life. Make sure your engine has a big inline fiber-media gasoline filter right before the carburetor, to make sure rust particles out of the gas tank don’t hold open your float valve and waste gas while idling. The built-in filter on the carburetor is not fine enough to accomplish the job properly. This does not apply to fuel injection systems. When any vehicle has been idling for a while, snort it a couple times to clean out the carbon off the plugs, before shutting it off, so the machine will be easy to start the next morning, worse if it‘s raining and/or cold. I have seen people not thusly snort, and then have to pull all the sparkplugs and clean them to get their engine started in cold stormy weather. Be aware of batteries which also have the marine wingnut terminals, but are not deep-cycle type. These are starting-running only type batteries, and I myself use them for starting-running application, because I like the idea of maximum capability, even if the extra marine terminals are never used. Deep-cycle batteries say deep-cycle on them, and cost nearly twice as much as starting types, and usually have the fancy extra marine terminals on them.

AMPS times HOURS equals AMP-HOURs of ENERGY (total), assuming consistent system voltage. This is not amps per hour, which would make no sense in this application.

VOLTS times AMPS equals WATTS (a RATE of energy usage).

WATTS times HOURS equals WATT-HOURS of ENERGY (total), independent of system voltage. This is not watts per hour, which would make no sense in this application.

SUCCESS is where PREPARATION meets OPPORTUNITY……usually.

A Mouth Speaking Truth Gathers No Foot. But possibly attackers. Pick the right time.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 19. The Hunt For PC Survivability.

A while back, after a 20 year lapse from fiddling with computers, I discovered that my pictures in my then-new binocular camera would only come out into a privately owned PC-type computer, shattering my assumption that I could carry it into the local camera store, and they would take care of me. I accused them of misleading ads, and left. I had missed my word processor, and writing machine code programs, so I looked over all the computer specials in the Sunday paper. I was in for a series of shocks.

I saw the mixed news at how big memories had gotten, which I was to learn mostly meant that programs had sprawled to fill the available space for them. It now takes 10 times the memory space it used to, for a page of typing. Even so, I couldn’t see buying an enormous memory, and was told at the cheapest store, that just for word processing, my box could get by just fine on the minimum option 256 Megabyte card. With the holiday season already HO-HO-HO-ing at my wallet, I figured I could always upgrade later if things got as tight as my money already was. All was well until I got into gadgets and widgets on my screen. Wow, those things really eat up the RAM memory! Things slowed down, and it wasn’t viruses, since it was unaffected by re-booting and re-formatting the hard drive, and reinstalling all the goodies. Also, things would return to normal upon erasing all the nifty gingerbread. I investigated the situation, and found that there were two slots for the memory cards, which were somewhat generic to all current model IBM-compatible laptops, mostly with speed differences. Mine had a single 256M in the bottom slot. I contacted the manufacturer on the web, to get the preferred part numbers for my box, but they gave no advice beyond that. These were disappointments # 1 & 2. No detailed manual for operating the computer, and no detailed help directly from the manufacturer.

On 2 Meter Ham Radio (KB7RI), I spoke with a guy who works on the boxes for a living. I was at first hoping to luck onto various rumors and average them out into some kind of plan, so it seems I used up a month’s good luck right then! He told me many things. I could put any part number appropriate size IBM-compatible laptop style memory card alone in the bottom slot, a 256, or a 512, or a 1024, according to his own experiences, or even a 2048 if I could find one, according to some insider book! This assumes matching memory speeds and the exact part numbers and such. I could at any time then add one exactly the same size in the other slot, and the box would automatically use them like one twice-as-big card. This was very good news, and I really appreciate the “automatic” part!

You guessed it. Immediately I was laboring over the decision of which RAM cards to add, and how soon. That day I could get by with just adding another 256 to total 512M, and get by for a long time. Conversely, I was already eyeing the photo processing programs, which take up a lot of memory. Also I had recently seen three things happen in the computer world. Memory sizes have grown by leaps and bounding over the bounds. Vista just came out, and there was talk of all the snags requiring 1024M or even 2048M to be fully compatible, once the “fixes” have settled in, from industry compliance and periodic update kits, even if some kind of photo lab is not envisioned. Additionally, in just a few months, the venerable and obsequious (long-lived and widely distributed) 1.5MB enclosed floppy disks had all been unceremoniously dumped by just about everybody simultaneously worldwide. When existing stocks are gone, people with the older machines may be stacking them and 8-track players together like cordwood! Or wearing out their USB jacks for add-on CD/DVD-RW drives, duct taped under their laptops! These three recent factors loomed ominously.

I had planned on using the 1.5M floppies as accessory capability, because of their darn rugged design, but it seems 1.5M doesn’t go as far as it used to, albeit still 100 or so printed pages, and they are ripped from my grasp before I even grasped them, because computer newcomers are already spoiled rotten! I feel cheated. The CD’s and especially the DVD’s have awesome capacity, but both are fragile, dust prone, and scratch easily. This dumping of the enclosed floppies doesn’t look like a totally good move to me. But that being final by now, an update of the enclosed floppy design is needed. By now we certainly can beat the old 1.5M capacity, without sacrificing all that fabled reliability and compactness. Yes, I know, we have cheap and stable USB 2.0 NAND at multi-gig size now, whether you call it flash drive or memory stick, and I am experimenting with G3 platform. MIGO seems to be a scam, in some ways.

For now, the price on the system memory RAM cards is falling. Then they will likely stabilize with inflation. Then they will be the victim of progress some kind of way, and right about when I need to have two 1024’s or even two 2048’s, I might be in for a time of it, with the lightning speed things get dumped at lately, by the computer industry. Right now I feel one 1024M soon, and another before too long. I feel that a lot of folks are in more or less the same lifeboat as myself, and my findings and anguish may be of service to many. I feel I am creating a trudge track in the deep snow here, or something like that, especially with the later part of this one article, as you will see!

I won’t specifically say that someone somewhere set up today’s PC’s for racketeering and spying on people’s files, but it has worked out that way. Most suspiciously, XP stuffs Adobe Reader down your throat behind your back, and by someone’s design you are faced with a clown act in putting anything on CD, where Adobe has more trouble getting at it upon clandestine command by some dastard lurking in an unsecured wireless node down the street. If “they” really want your files, Mr. Bluetooth can also be summoned by a repeater box in the next apartment, or in the bushes outside, or in your attic, to send out on a special frequency at long range power, a copy of everything in your box, including the contents of the disk in the drive! These guys consider it a challenge to defeat your security, and they delight in going to extremes. They get promoted in the mob according to difficulty and results, like getting anything you might use as a password two decades from now! Or some personal tidbit to menace at you with, to gloat that they can hit you at any time, anywhere.

So the first thing to do for anyone who has any personal data at all on files they don’t want dastards fingering, is to erase Adobe Reader and Bluetooth, unless you are actually using them. If you want them back, you can press f11 and the power up button at the same time, and reload things like your printer’s disk when you get around to it. Do a files search for the words Adobe (also adobe2), and Bluetooth (also Btooth, $winnt$, Blutooth, toothy, etc), and hit “delete”. To do this, Hit Start, then Search, then All Files and Folders. Use all names singly on search. Highlight each name found, select File then Delete/Enter. Empty recycle bin. Re-Search to confirm Delete. I keep a blank disk in the drive except when I am actually up/downloading on drive E. If you need Adobe Reader or Bluetooth, and have sensitive info on your hard drive, you have a position I don’t envy. Given time, other reader programs may well be similarly used, and/or clandestinely planted in your hard drive.

Recently, the goons broke into my space, killed my favorite plant, and set the front-panel switch on my PC to WLAN-enabled. It always stays disabled (off) on my computer, these days. (I try to always use a private and secure internet line.) They did it while I was in a store. I always check that little amber light, and other things while Windows comes up, so I know that they got very little if anything, this time. If I had not noticed, they could have secretly downloaded some reader program through the wireless LAN, not visible on my screen, with a handy steering program to transfer all my files out to their remote memory in torrent mode very quickly. I have proof it has happened exactly like that in the past. This is a truly vicious form of spyware technique, and it often has hundreds of yards or better range.

Since Bluetooth is good for enough range to get at you with planted or mobile equipment, you must erase it or watch it be used thusly at some point. Having data safely on CD’s not still left in the drive, with good deletions of the Hard Drive by both emptying the waste basket in the recycle bin, and by Shredding all unused Hard Drive space, you have got a fighting chance. Keep the LAN switch OFF when not using wireless, and don’t use open (unsecured) nodes, unless you are sure you have nothing on board to hide from the mob, and have a way to do full 3 hour reboots from disk to clear the fatal mob viruses they will eventually give you. In Vista, you cannot do full reboots with any Home Version, by yourself. So a word to the wise, don’t get any Home Version of Vista, as that will set you up for disaster. I expect Microsoft will fix this at some future time. Maybe.

It is my belief that more people would use the CD drive, E, if they had the recipe to pull it off! So I will now describe the 10 step safari to copy a file to CD, on XP which is what a lot of people have. Versions of Vista are rumored to simplify much of this, but compatibility issues and other snags have prevented me from getting into Vista yet.

Always be in the habit of visually inspecting the bottom shiny side of every single disk you are putting into your drive, for dust particles. Master the art of blowing a puff of air to remove the particles without spitting tiny spots of saliva in their place. I sparingly use peroxide 3% solution from the pharmacy on a lint free rag to clean both the widescreen and CD’s. I suggest taking a few deep breaths at this time.

1). Use My Documents, My Pictures, etc. for a launch pad to get things loaded onto a CD. Don’t ever willingly use Desktop for any files at all, as Desktop is intended only for shortcut icons to run programs. It is possible to do it in some cases, but you risk losing data, and the box will fight you. Better to avoid the “desktop death” and simply not put files there, ever! Many internet downloads go straight to desktop, and you have my sympathy when they do, as you must somehow move it into a document or picture file area, in most cases, to get access to CD functions. Heaven help you if you accidentally move a document onto the desktop. You may have to print it onto paper, which is about all you will be able to do in most cases, and re-type a document file, or scan the image of the print into a picture file, to get it out of desktop death, both of which solutions have extreme drawbacks! We assume you have a proper file in “documents” to work with, at this time. (The easiest way to erase an accidental Desktop file is the drag-and-click method. On an XP laptop, put the pointer on the icon. Then hold down the left click button, while moving the pointer and it’s now-captured vestigial image of the icon, over on top of the Recycle Bin icon. Release the left-button. The file is now in the Recycle Bin. Double-left-click to select and run the Recycle Bin program, as usual, and left-click on Empty the Recycle Bin, and click on the Confirm. So much for that sidetrack).

2). Left-Click (L-C) on Start or press the “windows“ key if available, and then L-C on My Documents, then L-C on the file you wish to load onto the CD. One click Selects it. Two quick clicks Opens it for more additions or changes, which is not what we are up to right now. Select it, which also automatically opens new Options on the Task Window, which you will need.

3). Move the pointer to either “move” or “copy”, both of which have become visible, and L-C one of them. “Move” erases the file from where it was. You can always delete the file later, so I suggest you use “copy”, and then you are safe if the CD has had too many updates of some file, or has gotten scratched, or there is a particle of dust you didn’t notice, and the procedure gets screwed up, and the file and disk are both lost! For this reason, I always make two disks (at only $.50 apiece) with the same name, and use “copy” to record onto the first one. If the disk bails out, and they sometimes do, I still have all my data! I make a new disk, and destroy the baddie. It appears that usually a CD is good for 5 to 10 erasures of a frequently updated file on it, so if I get near that point, I bail out and make a new disk outright, destroying the worn out one, before I get it mixed up with the good ones!

4). L-C on Drive “E”, which is several items down. Make sure you don’t space out and leave the default selection at the top of the options on Desktop Death, to your peril! Some say this is an obvious trap. Think before pushing any button on any machinery anywhere!

5). L-C on either the Copy or the Move, again, which will appear as you have already selected before, on step 3. This was arranged by the Department of Redundancy Department.

6). L-C to confirm “file replace” if you are updating an old file. This is a good time to keep an idea in mind of how many times you have updated this disk file! Danger, Will Robinson! At some point the disk may fail without warning, and you may need Abby to recover your files, if you were not suitably paranoid and used the two-disk method!

7). A balloon will appear at the lower right corner of your screen. L-C on the balloon, but not in the “X” spot, the universal “Cancel” act.

8). The CD Writing Tasks window will open. L-C on Write, but be careful to use the finger on the hand, not the arrow pointer, and avoid accidentally hitting the Delete instruction right below Write! Another obvious trap? You didn’t hear me say that! Sometimes Windows will be double-checking things for a minute or so at this point, and you should simply wait, if you hit Write and nothing happens. It sometimes will, so don’t do anything until the box is ready for the next step. All is well, or it soon will be. You will be informed when to proceed, and what to do in a minute or so.

9). Typically, now we “Welcome The CD Writing Wizard” by naming or confirming the name of the CD. If you forget this step, the disk will be named today’s date, which sometimes is a good idea but usually not, and you will have to change the name of the disk later, simply by typing it into the Wizard‘s diskname box the next time you add a file to the disk. By this point it is easy lo let your eyes unfocus, and just click it through, because ”something at all” is in the name box. But take heart! Surge forth and Name That Disk! Any minute now you will be rewarded by the dancing display, and you can put your hand on the box to feel the CD/DVD stepping motor whirring away in that superhuman precision which we can only appreciate the vibration of, in our vehicle of flesh!

10). Check the box on the Wizard, to automatically close the Wizard after the download is complete. This saves a step from then on, as the box stays checked until you uncheck it someday, or during a reboot. L-C on the “Next” box on the Wizard, and Don’t Touch Anything Else At All until the disk drive door pops open. But if nothing happens, no changes in the display, and sometimes this is the case, wait 3 minutes for Windows to get things sorted out and taken care of, and 5 minutes is better! Then L-C on Cancel, and slowly follow screen instructions, which will appear. Usually they make you repeat part or all of the procedure, and everything will often be well if you take your time, and do exactly what it says. If the disk has had it, the box will tell you immediately, and you may well be very glad you took my advice and ran with the two-disk-backup-same-diskname method! But if you are happily mesmerized by the dancing display and getting ideas concerning other vibrating machinery, rejoice! You have defeated a fearsome modern dragon, and your Chalice of Data is encouched in the rainbow breasts of whirling discoidum! You have reached the promised land! Oh, wait, something went wrong again, and it wants you to repeat the last several steps. But many times I have been told the disk was bad, but the next attempt succeeded anyway. Try it again, despite pronouncements of doom! Don’t give up, until you get 3 definite declarations of disk failure in a row! Maybe more!

Take a few more deep breaths! Now I ask you, isn’t all that just a little inconvenient? Folks in general will simply leave their files on the hard drive, where they can be easily harvested by those of the bad intentions. Is this somebody’s plan? If one must use the internet, I have to say that a secured line is the minimum security which is acceptable. The unsecured wireless nodes around town often have mob people on site, and they have been repeatedly caught intentionally giving good citizens who erase Adobe and other acts of disrespect to the mob, lethal viruses which only take 2 minutes to seize up your box, and neither Symantec nor McAfee even notice! Along with deleting unused files like Adobe and Bluetooth if any sensitive material at all is to be on your computer, including disks left in the CD-DVD Drive, we must remain aware that our personal data of all kinds can be used against us, in ways so lowlife that we assume no one would stoop that low. I urge you to consider this matter as you will.

Someday I plan to get “Photoshop or something similar” to process my binocular camera prints, and that’s 750M required for that by itself. Which puts total needs somewhat over the 1024M line, especially if I indulge in the gadget/widget stuff. Next step bigger is two 1024M cards. But I am still a little in shock, at first expecting that 256M would be fine, but now with all the changes, most of them my own doing, it looks like almost ten times that much RAM might be just enough to get by on. It will probably depend on how much the price of memory drops.

UPDATE: I was offered 30% off list on one-only big 1024M RAM card. I had recently heard that any second card gets second class treatment, so far unconfirmed, and decided to get the one “1G” card and see how it went. I can always get a second card if one doesn’t hack it, after I get Photoshop someday. Installation was almost too easy, and took less than one minute. Anyone can do this job. Read it all first! Unplug cord and remove main battery. There are two RAM sockets, the bottom one is the primary socket. Gently nudge the two retaining lever pins outward from the card flatways, one at a time, and the card flips up at a modest angle. Pull it out. Don’t touch the socket-contact areas on either card. While holding the new card in one hand, briefly touch the metal chassis with the other hand, to discharge static. Match up the key slot to the socket and slide the new card in at that same angle, until it is all the way in. It goes easy, so don’t force it. Take your time as you gently push the card down flat, and get two separate clicks from the two retaining lever pins, as they click and hold the card steady and level. The two pins never move or bend very much, so don’t try to get them to do so. Double recipe for double cards.

I discovered that my old 256M was only a 533mhz speed card. The new 1024M is the full 667mhz, or 25% faster. (The Microprocessor in this box runs at 1.8GHZ, which is a separate matter). This speed increase, plus a 4 times bigger memory makes quite an improvement in performance. Of course, the Hard Drive and CD/DVD aren’t any quicker, but I didn’t expect them to be. “Turnon” and “turnoff” take a fraction of the time! (Always use the icons for turnoff, to not risk losing data and settings. Don’t just close the lid, or the box may punish you). Other miscellaneous functions are either unaffected or unsettlingly faster. Windows doesn’t have to shuttle stuff into and out of the RAM so much now, to get routine work done, and that speeds things up dramatically. But in truth, the old 256M did function just fine for most uses, at adequate workman-like speed. Things go like the wind now, so I wonder what is to be gained by dual processors, other than a selling point.

ADDENDAE. I was having trouble erasing two of the array of Bluetooth files. I was confident that it would come together for me in it’s own time, so I considered the job as good as done. Then after a while, a series of events showed me that I had erased sufficient amounts of Bluetooth to get by.

It had been a few days, and someone assigned to mess with me got antsy and put a known criminal in his vehicle right up against my RV. Obviously this was an attempt to read my files with the Bluetooth which no longer seemed to be working. As usual in this location, my bug detector was useless because radar was locked on my vehicle, latching up the sensitive (and expensive) instrument. All of this revealing first, that minor vehicle movements on their Doppler radar computer-analysis-processed, would confirm I was at the keyboard and Bluetooth “should” therefore be working. Second, that “they” wanted a report right away. Hours later I got my confirmation that Bluetooth was in fact offline. While I was in a store, they broke into my RV and took only my main files backup CD. I had a copy of it stashed deeply, so I didn’t lose any data. In conclusion, the last two Bluetooth files which resist erasure, apparently aren’t sufficient to raid a box with. I imagine the saga will continue. I know I will! I had discovered that some of my files had been altered by someone scrambling numbers in places, and I had yet to fix this, and do the final grammatical and other checking before publication on the web. Today people asked me about things from that disk, which in some form is already making the rounds, no doubt further altered. When I do publish, folks will have two sets of data to compare. I am reminded that the ancient Gnostic Axis cult, which still survives as the steering organization of the mob, followed Jesus around, publishing similar but different Essene teachings in place of Jesus’s actual words. He said don’t resist the great evil of the Roman troop occupation, as they are looking for examples to crucify, and the mob of the day published it as don’t resist criminals, along with a big bunch of Essene teachings. They even put a bunch of this stuff in a cave by the Dead Sea for future generations to find, while destroying all real copies everywhere of accurate recording.

ADDENDAEM. I got another good deal on a 1G card, this time 1/3 off list. I removed the first 1G card and replaced it with the second one, to confirm that it worked ok by itself, and was therefore not defective. Simply plugging it in the available top socket, might have concealed a defect. No defect. So I plugged the original 1G card into the top socket, for a total of 2G RAM! I recycled the fancy anti-static plastic packaging one of the cards had come in, as a holder for the old 256M card, and put it away.

Frankly, I didn’t expect to see any improvement, just using the word processor, on 2G RAM, up from 1G. After all, the box flies like the wind on all tasks involving Windows shuffling stuff around to get routine work done, on the 1G system. Imagine my surprise at seeing a further 50% speed increase on such stuff, upon this admittedly outrageously overkill upgrade! This raises several questions. First, would an even higher memory boost make things even snappier, as though that were a goal, which I am already on record as backing away from. Second, why has no one in print mentioned this phenomenon, or maybe I just missed it. And third, despite my being an old fart on a fixed income and struggling to afford these upgrades, not all that much money was involved, really, so why do most folks lump along with small 512M memories? The only painful part of all this (for me) was having to “eat all those potato peels” to afford it!

I don’t really see a conclusion to this one. I have at times made compromised resistance to the mob, to keep them from pitching a fit and going crazy in a destructive way. It has often seemed not the right time for a physical confrontation, like Custer at Little Big Horn. He was temporarily separated from all his Gattling guns, which would have made all the difference. Great Army forces and Navy fleets have traditionally maneuvered and picked the time and place of battles, to at least get an optimized fight if they can. George Washington, Sam Houston, and many other Generals avoided certain defeat in an unoptimized arena, to rally victory at a later time. We delay the final exam until we finish the coursework! We wait until after the meal is prepared to sit down to dinner! The relationship between preparation and good luck must not be ignored, if important things are on the line, even if “preparation” becomes a very large subject. Patience and persistence wear down any obstacle.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 20. Global Climate Changes.

There’s a lot more going on with global climate, than most experts are talking about. The first thing we don’t hear much about, is that the earth has undergone repeated extremes of climate change back and forth for the last billion years or so. The second thing they don’t talk about, is what caused it in those cases. I am not revealing new information, just murmuring somewhat uncirculated knowledge to complicate everyone’s comfortable generalities.

First up, the true nature of God’s arrangement of the precarious balance of the earth itself. This means ice, mostly, at higher Latitudes and elevations. We are precisely at the balance point between ice in winter reflecting away heat, to delay Spring, to not melt as much ice, to reflect away more heat to hasten the onset of winter, for yet more ice. And the opposite of that with less ice, meaning more heat, for less ice. A slight difference in any major climate factor, tilts this absurdly delicate balance more than you might think, and there is a tendency to latch up into either hot or cold, given a nudge either direction. This is one point in favor of “intelligent design”, the immaculate pinpoint precision required for such to even exist, and here we are, polluting it. Surely life can exist in a fairly broad band of factors, many places in the universe, but that is far different from the utter startling precision of the earth’s ecological balance, a hundred times more magnificently precise than the simple requirements for life! We doubt our blessings while sitting on a sack full of Doubloons!

Secondly, there is an autobalancing factor involved, based upon photosynthesis, of algae, the rain forests, and other plants, to automatically adjust the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the primary “greenhouse gas“. There is pretty much a limited supply of active carbon kicking around, from the carbon dioxide in the air, to the carbon in plants which eventually gets eaten by bacteria and returns to the air. When there is more carbon dioxide available in the air, which warms things up a bit, to melt more ice, etc., the plants flourish and eat up the carbon dioxide excess, which restores the balance somewhat, releasing oxygen as a windfall for animals. All this acts slightly more than the ice reflection factors, to precisely stabilize the entire system, if nothing else is going on. God’s creation is more magnificent in its complexity than we can easily even know about. (Yes, I do own a V-8, but it’s a truck. It has good rings, or I would fix it.)

But there are larger factors than these so far listed going on, attacking the Earth’s hyperbalance. Over the ages, Solar energy is not constant. It varies a bit, just enough to fiddle with things in a delicate situation nearby, like our oscillatory climate. A small change in energy input to the local ecosystem here, is reflected as a larger change to the system than would be expected on a less active system like Mars, for example, which doesn’t have enough water available to make a lot of ice, to magnify changes. For example, to a dead chunk of space debris, like the trash from orbital weapons testing, a one percent increase in the thermal output from our sun, an average star, would increase the temperature around one percent of absolute temperature, of such a piece of space hazard. If that were 300 degrees Kelvin, on the side toward the sun, for easy figuring, we get 303 deg K, for a 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit increase. Call it several degrees, for a one percent power increase, or decrease. This is on a dead rock, now, and not an “amplifying effects” ecosystem with ice fields. The 1% scare factor is just something to toss around, for easy figuring.

Of course, it’s not specifically linear like that, but we can use the approximation for small temperature changes similarly to the Sine-Tangent scale on an old slide rule, which at small angles was close enough. Also, the autocorrecting CO2 feature of Earth’s ecosystem gets involved, but for a mere one percent change in the sun’s power output, at first glance it looks like the difference in room temperature between a short sleeved shirt and a sweater! The one percent figure was just a number tossed out for easy figuring, but also think what it might mean to have 5 or so degrees F upsetting the melting ice factor in the delicate balance. Expecting the sun to conform to tenths of a percent accuracy in heat output over long periods is expecting more than has been demonstrated in Geologic history. There have been several Ice Ages, and hot swampy periods interspersed. It has all happened before, and appears possible it may all happen again sometime. The entire millennium BC had some periods where the Middle East was not so very dry. And who could forget the world wide drought (the Dust Bowl years with 20 foot high dust berms piling up against the sides of houses) from which total crop failures caused the triggering of the Great Depression? Along with allowing buying Stocks on slim margin. Oh, I’m sorry, we’ve already forgotten, it was so horrible. Yes, let’s all pretend it never happened. What dust bowl was that?

As if all this weren’t bad enough, the Earth’s core is a huge fission reactor, and most of the earth’s rocks are also, to a very much lesser extent. Sparsely scattered in most rocks are Uranium 235 atoms, which occasionally go pop all by themselves. It adds up, and the earth warms itself steadily from the scattered U-235 atoms spontaneously decomposing, releasing E=MC2 energy. The hard radiation is absorbed by the surrounding rocks, so that’s good for us! Different heavenly bodies have different amounts of U-235 in them, and some have a lot, like certain volcanic moons scattered around. Our own moon had a lot of it for a while at first, but ran out long ago. The Earth itself had a lot early on, but has simmered down quite a bit from the early volcanic period caused by this U-235 fission heating.

Is that the end of that story? Not hardly. Uranium is quite heavy, and tends to sink slowly to the Earth’s core. The amount arriving in radiation proximity to other U-235 is not steady over time, and tends to arrive in clumps, the entire core being in motion by irregular heating from this hellish fission reactor beneath our floorboards. Things got out of hand for the planet which used to occupy the slot between Mars and Jupiter. A big clump of U-235/238 mix hit all at once and it blew the planet to pieces, forming the Asteroid belt. Scientists hope to avoid panic by claiming the Asteroids were formed by natural accretion processes along with the rest of the solar system, and point out that big meteorites from the asteroids falling in here, are the same age as the earth. Of course they are. All the planets were formed at the same time. But even the larger Asteroids show no advanced signs of accretion. There are two kinds of Asteroids, rocky and metallic, just like what would be left if the Earth blew up similarly. The truth of the matter is embarrassingly obvious. Conversely, the Asteroid belt is the largest source of wealth the humans have! All that mineable mineralization, not at the bottom of any serious gravity wells! Combine that with the halo of water ice crystals out past Pluto, and we are all rich. All the Deuterium we could ever need for our fusion reactors, and ordinary water to splash around in, just waiting to be scooped up. Will it be government or private enterprise which forms the social mores therein? Anyone who can’t see it all coming for our grandkids, isn’t looking.

Oh yes, the climate! A good tendril of U-235/238 mix arriving at the Earth’s core and we will have a warm swampy period, likely with more volcanoes. An absence of same will cause a cooler period, likely drier with more ice and less volcanoes. More swamp will mean more hunting from swamp-type ATV’s, like the capybara in Venezuela, or neutra rodent in Louisiana, in today‘s hunting. But if cooler, I find the real challenge is hunting in sub-freezing weather already, and have even designed a special cartridge for handling in cold weather by numb fingers operating a sporting single shot pistol, the 43 Winter Special, accurate, and designed to be handled by cold, numb fingers, and has adequately humane stopping power on live game without too much meat damage. Originally I called it the 43 Rapid Chamber, as it is designed with taper and large rim for this. The fact you can load it twice as high as needed for large moose, is a coincidence in the large physical design intended for cold human fingers handling, and no one needs to load it that high, which would have to be in a new Encore action to hold that much pressure anyway. I intend use in the old Contender action. 750 to 800 ft-lbs energy is plenty, at .430” bore, for any Whitetail deer, cold or not, with proper bullets and good hits at reasonable range. Don’t let your breath freeze on the scope lens. That’s real trouble.

A large meteor appears to have kicked up enough dust to have caused a quickie ice age, and chilled out those dinosaurs which weren’t already well-started developing feathers. Look at a chicken leg, at the junction between scales and feathers. Right there is the proof, as some of the scales are visibly half-feather. Several fossils of half dinosaur-half bird have been dug up in Germany and other places. Those dinosaurs with a down jacket in place were able to vacation in the tropics and survive. Dust from a large volcanic eruption has been shown to chill out world crops for several years in recorded history, during the first of the Dark Ages period. Now we know it was not a metaphor calling them “dark”. They actually were dark, and most people starved. This setback was quickly and conveniently forgot about, much like the feasts at Donner Pass. Whoever starved to death, became food for the others, and not talked about. Donner, party of 50! Frankly, under the circumstances, I would have offered to participate in the program if it happened in a natural way. But I remember canceling insurance because it made me more valuable dead than alive! Prions cause Falling Disease, which makes any cannibalism a bad bet, generally speaking, even Placenta parties, no matter how much Placenta Helper you add.

Burning carbon-based fuel makes Carbon Dioxide, and other stuff. The CO2 creates a greenhouse effect, holding heat to earth which otherwise would have reflected or radiated off into space, warming things up on the planet‘s surface. Other “greenhouse gasses” are created by generalized industrial processes, as well. We are not going to give up our cars, although we will certainly make them pollute the atmosphere as little as conveniently possible. That is until we run out of oil. At that time, we will have to consume the carbon dioxide to grow cultivated plants to make alcohol from, and burn that in our cars, thus replacing the CO2 to the atmosphere. That unto itself ought to work ok. So the problem becomes how to avoid screwing up the environment until we run out of oil. The oil lobby has channeled all the research in how to replace oil in our energy picture, not into how to get more corn, but an elusive high-tech enzyme process to convert prairie slip/switch grass into ethanol, at least years away if it ever proves practical at all. We already have strains of hybridized Indian/Aztec corn which will grow on marginal lands, and more types can be developed with “Frankenstein” technology. You take the basic plants and expose the genitals to some mutagen, or mixture of mutagens, and exhaustively see what turns up! That’s where new antibiotics often come from, and other products or plant types often happen the same way. It’s a long process, but you get to say “IT’S ALIVE!”

Recently the Bush Administration made a deal with Brazil and it’s neighbors to grow sugar cane to produce Ethanol in quantity real soon. This replaces the rain forest with sugar cane, but better that than poor soil bare earth after clear cutting! As long as it is done right, and that seems so far to be the case, things could be worse. Also, Brazil is planting millions of trees in areas which had been clear-cut and slash burned. I know I’ll breathe easier!

Anyway, the oil lobby is doing us a favor by jamming oil down our throats at shortage prices. Sort of. Anyway, there is apparently no way to stop them, and the situation will fix itself eventually, when we simply run out of oil. We likely won’t get serious as a species about alternative energy until we have to. I don’t know if investing in semiarid lands for Indian-Frankenstein corn yet to be developed, is such a good idea, unless the land has present-day uses. This could take even longer than the slip/switch-grass plan. Although, blue corn already exists, and a cross with the existing huge, high-starch maize already developed, doesn’t seem so far away. So what if it won’t grow on bare rocks with no water, I am curious what could be done right away with this or a similar program. Yes, I know, Hydrogen is the wave of the future, and I applaud the good starts we see in a few places. We must not let the progress into Hydrogen be lost, as it really will take over someday in the coming century or two. We will hasten its development by not forgetting about what we have already got together for it. It is very long-term, but it is coming, eventually. In the meantime, we can have largely symbolic ethanol “stills” in the backyard just as space age or hick-traditional as we feel like. It will be a good idea for the owner to report even a tiny one to the BATFE, just to be on the safe side. Even if it only makes a cup of Ethanol at a time, it’s a start. The sano models will make good holiday presents, complete with BATFE forms to send in so your friends will be bustproof.

By the way, it takes three distillations to make it have only a little water in it, for fuel use. Save the “low wine” to add to the next batch of mash ready to distill. It helps! And the yeast eats sugar, not starch. You have to cook the starches in the corn down to simple sugars, let cool, then add the fast-rising bread yeast. Cover well to keep the spirits from venting out, but not at pressure. Moonshiners got wood alcohol (Methanol) contamination from using wood casks to boil mash in, both in the cooking and later in the distillation, when the wood burned thin. One of the decomposition products of Cellulose is Methanol. Big stainless pressure cookers are very good for the manufacture of fuel alcohol, and copper tubing is cheap. A good scientific condenser can be made by running a ¼ inch copper tube inside a ½ inch copper tube. A tee fitting at each end of the ½ incher and a ½ inch cap on each end with a ¼ inch hole drilled in each cap, the whole works soldered together, works fine with water running through the jacket. The ¼ inch tubing runs straight through the ½ incher and two stubs soldered up with it’s Alcohol contents never touching the solder. A trickle of water is usually plenty, through the jacket, and the whole works can be coiled up compactly into an eight inch diameter, with garden hose fittings for hydrant use. Tygon tubing slips on the ¼ incher, for a good seal. To keep the fire as low as possible, build in a good thermometer, some kind of way, to the pressure cooker. The lower the temperature, the higher the alcohol content. Don’t let boil-crud get in the output tube, by keeping the fire very low, which also tends to increase alcohol percentage in the hot vapors. And don’t let people sample the product by tasting it. Word will get around. I have nothing to worry about. I’m allergic to alcohol and everybody knows it!

The real question in my mind is how much global warming will be caused by burning up the oil products before we run out of oil? The Global Warming people assume we will never run out of oil, which is typical of Reactionaries in general, using subjective thinking. Objectively, there are real quantities to deal with, when making predictions. We will run out of oil. Coal is not as easy to make gasoline and diesel fuel out of, as are the organic substitutes ethanol and biodiesel. How many people know that Henry Ford’s first car ran on alcohol? The gasoline industry hadn’t blossomed yet at that time. Anyway, assuming no huge breakthroughs in coal tar molecular cracking techniques, over the basic technique worked out by the Nazis (high temperature and pressure with catalytic agents of steam, iron oxide, and/or nickel), the use of coal to create more greenhouse gasses will be limited. Half of the nation’s electricity does come from coal at this time, but newer plants are successfully capturing the CO2, nitrates, sulfur oxides, and waste heat, because the installations are not mobile, and the scrubbing machinery doesn’t have to be carried around, like a catalytic converter on a car! Cultivation of whatever plants to make Ethanol fuel will consume CO2, which is the bulk of the greenhouse gasses. I am not saying Global Cooling will be our next problem, but we are barely past the last Ice Age, in a series of them, in fairly recent Geological time frame. Once we run out of coal and oil, we might well be in the opposite situation as today, with actual global cooling to worry about!

Of course, we must not allow the asymptotic increase of CO2 emissions which would definitely screw up the Ecology with way too much global warming, but it must be recognized that deforestation is just as big a cause of the changes we now are seeing! Just because it is becoming a Cause Celebre to be doing something about the Carbon, does not mean that is enough to stop all the real damage. And the planting of one tree per person ceremonially won’t make much of a dent either. Most of Earth’s forests are already gone, and the soil eroded. This happened about parallel in time with the CO2 blight. Nice cover. Blame it all on Carbon.

I will continue to oppose the substitution of hysteria for facts in all endeavors. It is only coastal marshes which will be affected by a few inches of water, assuming we can hold it to that by conservation and updating our coal-burning plants to capture CO2, and those marshy areas see more than that already from natural events. Global deforestation is a much bigger problem, complicated by everyone’s enjoyment of things made from wood. I did some professional tree-planting mostly for my health, but also to learn firsthand the situation, by hand. If you ignore the annoying failure rate of seedlings and replant those failures on the typical floating contour grid system, these barren areas spring forth with Corona points to literally draw moisture from the skies to re-establish the balance of nature cheaply and easily! The growing ecosystem from the moisture, drops leaves to create topsoil, and Nature fixes itself. You get to pick what grows where, for eventual easy and low impact harvesting. Powermongers and control freaks take note, reforestation is the new frontier.

I find it most annoying that food-for-humans type corn is being used in part for Ethanol production, purposely to get the price up artificially. This is straight up fraud, primarily because Maize field corn is a lot more productive per acre, and it is not being planted, to create an artificial shortage. They will get away with this so long as the public thinks “corn is corn”, and there is “only so much” of it. The truth is that we have a lot of unused land which could be growing Maize, but is not, because of outright racketeering conspiracy, between the lowest land barons and the highest levels of government. It is all trackable through FOIA documents. We can swat a mosquito which is sucking our blood, or not, as we choose.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #21. A Warrior/Hunter Coaches A Kid.

I assume the kid is around 10 to 15 years old, and is now upon themself enough to realize the value of a Warrior Council, wherein everyone tells the blunt truth, no matter who it hurts, if it is reasonably relevant to the subject.

OK kid, here it comes. If you depend upon anyone other than yourself for your personal successes, you will have precious few of them. The best individual plan involves the least dependence on others. Conversely, leadership can serve the willing with coordination of their efforts, and arrangement of supplies and resources, to accomplish much more than the totals of individual effort. The key to leadership is that the leader is the servant of those led. As you see, there is a balance in all of life.

You can never have too many good backup plans, and workable fallback positions. You may well need plenty of both before very long. The form of it will change, but always have a “bailout kit” or a ”survival pack” of appropriate design concealed but handy. Many high quality older people look back on times when they either had such a kit, or wished they had! The biggest threat facing you will be people who use their freedoms and liberties to create a margin for wrongful or even criminal activities, affecting you or those close to you. Perhaps you have noticed that intelligence itself is mostly the result of having an attitude wherein you notice things, and arrange to gain access to more things to notice. That includes noticing connections in the things that don’t get by you unnoticed.

Let’s put this on the ground. No matter how good your finance plans for the education you will need to live well in this world are, no matter how well you are originally placed in it, things can always go wrong, and it seems so more often than not, these days. Most frequently, people discover to their dismay, that a Bachelor’s Degree is generally not marketable by itself, and (gasp) there is no way to pay back the Student Loan, resulting in a promising but thoroughly sabotaged life! Unless, of course, you saw the possibility of things going wrong, and covered your act, preferably in multiple ways. More on that shortly.

There are two major sources of bad advice. Many other young people will think their hopes and expectations actually constitute the real world, and they expect everyone else to have a world view conforming to this, which includes your personal plans they hope to specify for you. Older people usually think their defensive and psychotically rosy view of the world is reality, and they think any phony-but-rosy plan they dump on you is as good as any other. Often this person is assigned to be your mandatory councilor at school. Mine was an exception to this, but way too many of them will begin by forcing traps onto you. It begins with the “innocent” question whether you plan to get any secondary education after High School.

If you say yes, they will typically tell you to avoid the vocational classes you may well need to put yourself through college, which could happen to the richest of us, if history is any kind of indication of what tomorrow might be. We just celebrated the new Millennium with a partial Stock Market crash! Smug spelled backward is gums, which might be all one has to depend on some fine morning. Also a “yes” answer will put you into classes labeled College Preparatory, in which the material is actually no different than the regular classes, but teaching services are somewhat withheld, and you are also graded more harshly to boot, thus damaging your grades and therefore your chances at college acceptance. There is some justification for claiming to be undecided, and wanting the vocational classes for whatever reason.

This, just described, is the first part of the weeding-out process to establish a ruling class of people, even in High School; get tutoring at no small expense, or be eliminated for being smart but not rich. I just read ahead in the books, and that worked fine for me. Math and science classes can be a partial exception to this, as a Cartel of nerdiness often runs that show, with rules all it’s own. Once again, read the back of the book. You will need this information, and it gets you a promotion with the Cartel! Don’t be obvious or needy about making friends at this stage of things. Be worth knowing, and you will amass an army of friends whom you will desperately need favors from over the years, so do them any favors you can now. And keep an address book of all your contacts! After High School people seem to disappear forever somehow. Send Winter Solstice cards, or your choice of some other holiday. The Mages did benefit work at the tightest time of year, and a lot grew out of that, mostly keeping track of their friends some kind of way, when everyone was off work. The Winter Solstice holidays were no accident.

Whether through elective vocational class choices for next semester, or through a variety of How-to-books and Summer jobs, you must learn at least one solid way you can support yourself, and attend college at least part time, when that time comes. The idea that college will qualify you for a higher but nonexistent salary to cover the student loans, is a joke without a punch line, except you get solidly punched for not seeing ahead! Everyone in today’s world needs at least one part-time college course sometime. Without that simple minimum, people will leave a stream of “defecation” down your back, which won‘t wash off.

Everyone must also take typing, either in class or on our own, to fit into today’s world. Fifteen minutes per day using proper method, on any old garage sale typewriter or $20 computer, will force the subconscious to do most of the work while we sleep. Never let anyone see you hunt and peck with index fingers, even if it means extreme slowness. What is being judged is whether you know the right place to put all your fingers!

This fifteen minutes a day method also works for learning guitar! Use a How-to book for either one, to avoid forming “screwup” habits. Don’t admit to any school personnel that you know anything about music or singing, or they may try to force you to join the school band or choir, even by racketeering against you. If you want to join, fine, but it’s a huge time commitment, almost guaranteed to lower your grades, even more than the racketeering, unless your school gives you a break on homework volume, as some do. For either the typing, or guitar playing, if you are so inclined, be sure and get a How-to book, not just to prevent you from forming “screwup” habits, but also to keep from missing easy techniques you might not have chanced onto any time soon by yourself. Different guitar books describe different styles. I don’t make bar chords with the index finger laid across a fret, and perhaps you shouldn’t either, nor just strum all the strings. Nobody sounds especially good doing either of those. But do what you want, of course.

Also, many schools offer homework reduction for students with part-time jobs afternoons, if they consent to the school messing with their employer. I was fired from such a job because the school found out and had my boss audited. I was put into both band and choir room advisories, and ragged on for not joining, most of the time I was in High school.

The How-to books for your “backup-summer-job” plans must be memorized, cover to cover for two reasons. First, if you skip any knowledge at all, or make any simple mistake, those who inhabit the work crew by racketeering as a substitute for handiness with tools, will delight in throwing it at you forever, in the creepiest ways you can possibly imagine! On the plus side, this shows you who your enemies are. They try to do this to everyone, and no one is perfect all the time, to avoid them. Most crews have people like this. Smile at them, and don’t take any bait at all. When they smile at you later, remember with a smile that they tried to cut you out of the hiring seniority and promotion order, and take your job away, while they don‘t deserve theirs. Such cannibalism eventually reaps it’s reward. Just keep smiling, but not too much, as their assistant someday becomes their boss.

Secondly, you need to pick up absolutely as much of the jargon and “insider small talk” as possible, since that is most of your hireability. Yes, the babbling. Use it but don’t overuse it, or they will catch on that it has limited actual experience behind it. Practice with the tools of the trade somewhere, so you don’t look like it is the first time you have held them in your hands. They watch for that. See a work symbol as a work symbol, and handle it that way, with a “can do” self-starter attitude. They watch for that too!

Wherever you go, two things are endemic to the human species. Both are traceable to the fact most humans have different genetics from the “talented 5%” globally. Some say it is from a huge amount of interbreeding with the Neanderthals during the Ice Age debacle. Be that as it may, the large amount of both untalented and openly criminal genetics is a potentially lethal problem for anyone who demonstrates the 5% genetics, from the untalented criminals; or conversely, anyone who demonstrates the 40% criminal genetics, from the authorities. The criminals try to recruit or at least label anyone they see as a future cop as a criminal, to prevent a law enforcement career, or get the services of geniuses and natural leaders for the unintelligent criminal hordes. Since both morals and being a nice person are the product of intelligence and environment, this means everywhere you go there is a loose average of 5% genuinely nice (saintly) people, and you have but to find them. Of course, they are in hiding, for their own safety. Historically, the Neanderthals and Cro-magnons have tried to edge each other out, through anything from racketeering to murder. Even since now that they are mixed, the ethnic cleansing goes on and on, one way or another. Take this seriously now, or wait until it has cost you.

In churches, much of the membership is genetic or recruited criminals seeking cover, or gloating over the fact they have infiltrated a church to get away with doing Satan’s work using church facilities and events, or it is part of a plea bargain or business arrangement. Many others are there because it appears a cheap alternative to military school for their delinquent children, or to contain older delinquents. So the 5% holds even in a church, generally speaking. In a jail, a certain few are there as nice people who got set up by the mob to turn them against the legitimate authorities, a very effective technique, since the mob works to plant a disturbing percentage of dirty officers. Even in a jail, the 5% rule still generally applies. So, anywhere you go, there is likely that one in 20 who is a genuine saint or genius, desperately hiding and posing as “normal”. You have but to find them and try not to blow their cover. Overall, anything which makes one stand out as “different”, will get one attacked by the bad monkeys, either from the top or bottom of the local power structure. Think twice before showing any pearls, much less casting them before swine, as they will try to eat you, along with the pearls. It’s sad, but you must be prepared to deal with it, or it will deal with you.

Many or most people screw up their college education, depending on how you measure it, whether 2 years of Junior college or more in other plans, by taking too many subjects at the same time. The “full load concept” is a mistake for most people. Few can learn that much that fast. Those who appear to do so are usually students with pre-existing knowledge in that array of subjects, or are bribing people. Again, the culling of the non-wealthy, to create a ruling class. Knowledge is power is security. Knowing this and having the moxie for self-restraint when it makes a positive difference, your armor is your intelligence. Don’t slam the door in your own face by taking too many subjects, no matter who says to do it, or whatever brainwash chemicals they may have sprayed you with, to soften up your resistance to being dictated to. Remember, if you perceive that you have been sprayed by someone now talking to you, (1) they are up to no good, (2) they are not your friend, (3) they are guilty of criminal assault with terrorist gas weapons, and belong underneath the jail, (4) they too are an earlier similar brainwash victim, (5) you don’t have to tell them the truth, and you are safer lying to them some way to be able to tell later that whatever they instructed you to do or say, goes against your wishes and was merely an “instruction” they then told you to not think about being given but to obey anyway, (6) they are backed up by organized criminals worldwide, which means, (7) the FBI has jurisdiction. Someone thusly has raped your mind and future. Use the anonymous tip method.

Don’t be in a hurry getting education credentials, for the obvious reason and one other. The people you meet in evening and weekend college classes for part-time students, are usually motivated and sharing-type folks, who work hard for what they get in life, and who will value your friendship as deeply as you have the good sense to value theirs! Contrast this with the rich snobs you endure in regular classes, who will only value your trust fund. (What, you don’t have one? What are you doing in here? Shouldn‘t you be in evenings? You better transfer before something happens! Or just stay and we‘ll have them hand you a C for your “A” work, to cover for the A‘s and B’s we sold!). One sees where the valuable experience and promising future are actually to be found in these higher education setups, and it‘s often not the regular MWF 10 AM. Choose wisely, and don’t talk about this with any classmates at all, or it will come full circle and bite your posterior! You can simply affirm that all students have more in common than not, and keep smiling! It is the rich fakes who will have to fake it to everyone they meet professionally, based upon their phony bribed grades and even more phony education, until they eventually catch on to their profession’s sophistry setups outside the school, where non-degreed people actually do the work and develop the breakthroughs, which are usually stolen from them, by the ruling criminal clique with the phony A’s.

Most of what happens around, is the varied interplay between people. No two people mix together the exact same way, and it is often either unpredictable, or completely predictable. The best Martial Arts people seldom get into fights, and poor fighters seem to fight all the time. Similar people either bore each other to death, or spend their time in endless struggle for superiority. Dissimilar people either fall into a dominance/oppressed stable configuration, or a protection/clinging pattern, depending upon whether the stronger person is a “giver-nurturer“, or a “taker“. In all these patterns and others not named, there is usually a lot of interaction, wherein each one either as a hammer or a nail, has an effect on the other. Because of the unavoidable interaction, nobody can truly say they had no effect on the other concerning any particular event. For example, the partner who gets lethal or non-lethal VD because an unfaithful partner didn’t use protection when secretly cruising, could have raised consciousness a number of ways concerning the situation well beforehand. It is just as true to say that everything which falls upon a person is in some way deserved because they had a hand in it some kind of way, as to say that nothing which falls upon a person is specifically and ultimately solely self-caused, and therefore was not totally deserved. We are hopelessly connected to each other, and brutally alone at the same time. Again, notice the Balance Of Life. Deal with it.

One more time, whether you are still in grade school, or penetrating a college, please find some excuse to keep a good address book of all your contacts. Use holiday cards to keep up with people, letting them know what you are up to with this, and how important it is. Contacts evaporate quickly. Ask any older person what percent of all the folks they one time knew, that they still have contact with. They will probably get real quiet. Peoplefinders, et.al., doesn’t quite cover it. You need at least a list to work from, and it helps to keep the old gang together some or any way at all.

There is usually a shortage of Genuine Leaders, and a surplus of bullies and racketeering criminals, wherever you go. Remember that the true leader is the servant of those led. While setting a good example is one form of leadership, a little more interaction is usually more effective. Of course, watch for exceptions and special situations. Without being overbearing, one can often find a need of some kind from tactical to supply somewhere in the scattered human culture, and at least see what is going on, to then serve with leadership. That is usually the first step toward doing any good. This, of course, will make you the enemy of all kinds of crooks and powermongers, so be careful. Anyone doing anything right will make the inept look more inept, the evil look more evil, and the lazy look even lazier. People claiming to be the leader through bullying and racketeering, are absolutely dangerous, and will attack anyone who they think even might get in their way. If they see you are a Genuine Leader, who would serve the people, it is natural that they feel deeply threatened. It is easier for them to get rid of you, than to change their ways and grow as a person. Their entire criminal lifestyle, and possibly their genetics, are at stake, and they may panic and try to make you an example of insubordination to their beastly arrangements. The better person you are, and the nicer you are to those who aren’t, the more danger you are in, and the more power you wield. Since you know this universal principle, whatever you do or don’t do, is your own doing. But then it is not, because I put you up to it. Behold again the Balance of Life. Go forth and be who you are to be.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #22. Planck, The Hunter.

Yes, Max Planck, the Physicist. He had to have a hunter’s instinct, as we will see. There is also a story about Al Einstein, who wasn’t “getting” Algebra, as in, “Who cares about this X thing?”. His Uncle counseled him on it that the X was like a Fox and he had to hunt it. Al swung in on that just fine!

Planck is most famous for his idea that getting close enough to an active thing changes it enough that we can only know so much about it, before screwing up your observations by getting too close, and experiencing the point of diminishing returns. A lot of things are like that. Anyone who knows they are being stalked, watched, or judged, behaves differently. See who the person is from a distance before showing any interest in them, or you will get their “act”, which is also something you need to know about a possible associate. But not the main thing.

To see where the deer actually lay up or feed, we can’t get close enough to them to see it happening once hunting season starts, as they are spooked beyond our comprehension if nobody is right now trying to kill us. We have to already know from long before hunting season, and our scent may well have caused them at that time to abandon those areas until next year. Even if we are only preparing to take telephotos from a goodly distance, they don’t know this, so the rules are the same.

We have to know from judging tracks and spoor. Don’t follow any deer trails after very early spring, with lots of rain left in the season to wash away scent. The least that can go wrong is that our intended clients will abandon their best feeding areas for a year. I have been able to get away with briskly crossing deer trails, and further on crossing them again, keeping moving and not touching anything but the ground with no tracks in it. Briefly pausing concentrates our scent which sticks to things we haven’t even touched! The deer are used to smell-seeing predators cross their trails, and can tell if anyone paused. They look for that.

Where legal, we can feed in certain spots, perhaps posing as feeding the cattle, who will surely get their share, which may get the deer used to your particular scent, or it may just feed the cows and scare the deer away. Lots of folks spend every weekend transporting in clover hay right up to hunting season, only to see all the deer head for high altitude thickets at the first sound of gunfire!

Clearly the best method is to ruin an area one year and hunt it one or two years later. Or get the word from someone who knows from the past where a good spot is. Being new in an area and alone, is a good way to come up with an empty game bag, unless we happen to be very good with USGS topo maps, or are lucky in love with hunting. Also, I have seen areas where the wilderness is only available in smallish patches, and the deer there are those which genetically aren’t afraid of humans, and the patches are too small for regular hunters to get “permission“, tacit or otherwise. But handgun hunters sometimes can, because of the short range nature of big bore handguns. A scoped revolver might or might not pass inspection, but a 14 inch 6.5 JDJ and scope would scare the neighbors with their living room ¼ mile away for sure, in such tight areas. A good hunter knows where the Planck’s distance on any situation is. The short range issue has stuck many hunters with shotguns in many areas, whether it was judicious caution, or 2^nd Amendment infringement.

Usually by discovering what we need to know to hunt an area, we have “Plancked” out the hunting there for a good while. But we often have to give it a try anyway, or forget hunting. Some deer are stupid, or coming in from another nearby area for some reason, so there is always a chance! Know exactly where you are going, approach from downwind swiftly but quietly and nonchalantly, making no “predator style” movements, and disappear into some kind of blind. No talking, no smoking.

I keep planning to get one of those self-standing blinds you can practically throw at the ground and it assembles itself. But there are natural blinds everywhere that I have wanted to blind-hunt from, using camo and background which blend together. Perhaps there is a bit of Psychology in that array of selections, about wanting to disappear quickly, and get out of early-season work making blinds for other hunters to beat me to. I have seen hunters take someone else’s worthless blind just for the thrill of conquest. How many times fishing have you caught a fish, and some idiot runs over and puts his line in exactly where you were, so you have to move all your stuff? All the fish are scared away from that spot anyway! And people jumping in front of us when they know we are shooting! There has never been a shortage of total idiots. The older I got, the more I hunted and fished alone. I feel it is safer, because I am an experienced mountain man, and carry a 2-way radio for emergencies. Less experienced or equipped folks are stuck with the buddy system.

If I do get one of those pre-fab spring-loaded blinds, I will set it up somewhere in the wilderness where no one will find it, and it can outgas all summer in the shade. At some point I will practice for speed and stealth, setting it up. When in actual use, on warm days it goes in shade. On cold days, it will sit next to the shade so the sun warms things up inside. Solar energy is more than 900 watts per square meter in direct sun. Yes, I know, there is precious little sun during hunting season, but it’s free. If a Blue Norther hits, instead of the tooth-chipping cold, I will not have a trace of shivering to despoil my aim, as bright, warm sunlight clearly shows me what I am shooting at. One can arrange to meet up with such weather in the hunting fields. One can arrange one’s proximity to the bad weather period’s effects on our hunting, by choice of blind and timing, with deference to expected weather. Planck strikes again!

Several times on federal lands where one can get away with it, I have located moist spots in dry areas. The vegetation is often a clue. A little digging often yields a tiny spring which didn’t make it to the surface. I take a quart or so sized plastic juice jug and make holes in it. Then I poke some black plastic tubing into it, and lay it into the center of the wet I have dug into. I dig a trench slightly downhill from the bottom of the hole, for the water to run down the tube, and out on top of the ground. I cover it all back up, except for the tube coming out. I let it empty into a second hole I have dug, deep enough to hold a canteen properly for filling. As a caveat, I have seen rare “poisonous” mineral springs which ought not be drunk from, in a general area of good springs, so there is always that possibility things can even intermittently go sour. If the new water has a funny taste, or I get sick from it, I will pull up the tube, but it has never yet turned out that way so far, using this technique. Grateful animals of all kinds put these “new” springs on their route, and so do I. I think this works out for hunting, as the deer get my scent associated with a good thing, and as the price of water. In so doing, I force the Planck distance to become smaller between me and the deer. The Planck distance between my own tendency toward thirst and its negative effects upon my hunt to become very small before it has any effect, since extra water access is added to the system. More than once, ranchers with Federal graze-lease contracts have installed water troughs to fill up for their cattle from my little improved springs. This creates a carnival atmosphere at the water source, and the Planck distance for all wild or free-run creatures, joyously minimizes!

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #23. The Mini-14 And Deer.

I used to own a Mini-14, and it was really something! Exactly what, I am still trying to figure out, more than 20 years later.

The 52,000 CUP (copper units of pressure, similar to psi with metal flexion factors included) in a carbine barrel was exciting, in terms of muzzle blast, if nothing else. Those little ears on the bolt holding back all that punch from removing the face of the shooter, also added to the adrenaline, whenever I thought about it. In truth however, I never heard of the Mini-14 bolt failing on any proper ammo. So eventually I stopped worrying about that bolt and the possibility of half my teeth sticking out of a tree somewhere, someday. All day, every day, we trust in the Law of Averages, and the secret to a happy life is to do our best and get on with it. The gun never gave any trouble at all of any kind. Thankyou, Bill Ruger!

So I used the Mini-14 with stock ammo, or careful hand loads to duplicate the loading levels of stock ammo. To my credit, I couldn’t tell the difference in any way, except that the reloads were cheaper. In fact, I only neck-sized the cases, and occasionally trimmed for length or reamed for brass flow into the necks, and never had one single jam in over 1000 firings while I owned and used it. It seemed there was a “brass flow into the necks” problem, but I was on it, and never had a single jam.

Because of the scary bolt design, and because my testing showed that the 55 grain bullets maximized the performance of the 223, I didn’t get into heavier bullets. The reduction in velocity from heavier weight bullets resulted in about the same wet-lap penetration as far as I could tell. So I couldn’t justify the extra strain on those little ears on the bolt. If I had hunted deer with the Mini-14, I would surely have used the 60 grain Nosler Partition bullets and just gritted my teeth, as those little 55 grain JSP pills might go hooey on a rib, or leg bone. The partition design of the 60 grain NP’s would prevent that. But the 223 remained a ranch gun, which meant iron sights. I already had a good scoped deer rifle in 243 Winchester, and back then a brush busting 45-70 Siamese Mauser, in case any Cape buffalo showed up in Southern Oregon!

I never even tried full-length resizing, because I never had a single jam with only neck-sizing, which is lots more accurate, as the bullet exactly lines up with the bore. Of course, I kept it cleaned and oiled, to get that performance. In gritty combat use, it’s full-length resizing for the very best reliability in that arena, if they let you reload at all. Some guys illegally reloaded soft point bullets for their chamber round, in hopes of not dying in a rice paddy that afternoon! I don’t know if they full length resized or not. In truth, I was worried about accidentally shoving the shoulder back, risking a head separation, and extra guff on those bolt ears from it! Fortunately, with neck-reaming I had no need to full length resize. I discovered the brass-flow problem, by reaming to determine what was what as a diagnostic tool, to prevent any possibility of trouble with those little ears in mind! I saw metal being removed in irregular patterns on used cases. New ones had no such characteristic. So I simply reamed every single time, and had no trouble in the field, with my particular gun. This might not apply to your gun.

As is my custom, I did slick up and polish all mating surfaces throughout the rifle, including the lockwork. There is a limit to what you can do on semi-auto trigger pulls, but I did manage to get rid of 2/3 of the roughness and creep in the pull. If you do this yourself as a training exercise, be careful about changing any angles or contours on mating surfaces, unless they need it to reduce excess “hammer rise”. Even aggressive polishing can easily change geometry to cause “hammer lowering” during the pull, an unsafe condition. If you screw up a part, call it the cost of learning, and order a new part to try again. There is no shame in learning at the expense of a few new parts, but there is plenty of shame in screwing something up in learning, but then not re-doing it correctly on a new sear, or whatever. Order it directly from the factory. If they resist, tell them you are studying gunsmithing, which is the truth.

I also bedded and free-floated that Mini-14. First, I removed some wood down about 1/16 inch roughly, where the action rested on it. Then I mixed some JB Weld and puddled it onto those two spots a little higher than the wood had been, with steel screen inside the epoxy. I let it cure to the consistency of stiff putty, then assembled the oiled action to the stock, only tightening the screws down to where the action was properly located. I let the epoxy cure with the action in that exact position. This completes my version of the bedding process. It works fine for me. I then full-floated the barrel by wood removal, and aluminum removal from inside the barrel band. I did a good job, and you almost had to know I floated it to see it, but you could slide a card around the barrel full-length! The little gun shot awesomely well, but I never really used that level of accuracy capability, by using just the iron sights around the ranch, and varmint hunting quick shots, on called-in game.

I used a “dying rabbit” call to bring in coyotes. As it was a mixed wooded area, more birds of prey always responded than coyotes, and many times I nearly got nailed by them! Of course, all birds of prey are protected, and deserve to be, so I had to avoid any accidental discharges which sometimes wasn’t easy! It got to where I hunted the coyotes to see how many birds of prey would show up. I feel good about the fact I never endangered any of them by accidental discharge, but I’ll never forget how close I came one time when the red tail of that hawk smacked me in the face! It was as surprised as I was, and I take pride in the fact no shell was wasted. All of this was more fun than a carnival ride people pay for! Since the coyotes became a means, rather than a goal, I stopped shooting them, and counted coux (a plains Indian custom) on how closely they and the birds came in. Eventually I only carried a handgun in case I got cornered by any kind of danger. In the wilderness, you shouldn’t take chances. Rattlesnakes come with varying numbers of legs, the two-legged being the worst. Crazies and criminals hit the woods, sometimes.

So my old Mini-14 got reduced to competition with the 22 rimfire against the plague of ground squirrels inundating the area at that time. One in ten actually had plague, so I had to be careful cleaning them to not nick myself, and boil them half an hour because of the high altitude. I had some Terramycin in the first aid kit, which kicks ass on plague, should that ever happen to be a problem. In general, I feel I must eat what I kill. The scoped rimfire and a good blind were all I needed to use the 22 rimfire just fine on the ground squirrels, so that left me exploring other options for the 223. The State of Oregon required a 24 calibre minimum to hunt deer, which I support as as good a place as any to draw that line, among other good choices, such as muzzle energy minimums on 22 calibre guns, so folks can use the 22-250. I realize this is controversial, and ought to also have bullet weight minimums specified for big game use, like 60 grain Nosler Partition, or 70 grain ordinary soft point spitzers, as Mule deer and big Whitetails constantly wander throughout Oregon, and pretty much everywhere else, out West. Speer quotes their testing of a typical 22-250 on their 70 grain semi-spitzer as getting 3300 feet per second (fps) for 1790 ft-lbs of muzzle energy. If range and game size aren’t stretched too much, a guy could do a lot of good with that. The 1000 ft-lb delivered power line is at 150 yards or so, which covers virtually all woods hunting of deer! The 223 is good for 3200 fps with 60 grain bullets in top loadings, for 1450 ft-lbs muzzle energy, and because it is a real spitzer with better pointy Ballistic Coefficient, it also has 1000 ft-lbs delivered at 160 yards or so, but it’s a 17% lighter bullet, which can be a Nosler Partition bullet! All these offsetting factors! Perhaps one gathers insight why Oregon just said no to using 22 Calibre on any deer.

The use of the 223 on those tiny Columbia Blacktail deer would have been okay in my view, with the Partition bullets, but since there were also Whitetail and Mule deer wandering about from time to time, in from Eastern Oregon, the badges felt it prudent to just say no. I feel it’s just as well. I know one guy who even tried to use his stainless Mini-14 on elk, cowboy style from horseback, as though pure enthusiasm would give those little 55 grain bullets better penetration, and he made a real mess of it! The witnesses were bribed with elk steak, permeated with gut juice and therefore worthless, but as conspirators, they then had to remain silent anyway. I only heard about it months later, but all accounts agreed on the details, as though they were warning me to not try it, since they thought I still owned the 223 at that time, but had actually sold it a year previously. I feel I must have a reason for keeping all specific possessions, or they would overwhelm me. The Mini-14 wasn’t any longer being used. It had been fun, but then and now, I had limited space in the club’s locker. It was like selling a pet when I sold the Mini-14.

My 243 Winchester I had built on a VZ-24, had already become my go-to gun for the big game hunting I was interested in. Frankly, I consider the 243 Winchester too light for elk, at twice the power index of a 223, although some experts do it to show off that it can be done, with perfect hits, using perfected design partition bullets, on perfect broadside presentations. I think 3 required “perfects” in a row ought to be some kind of clue. Conversely, I cannot justify killing as large an animal as an elk, having no way to deal with that much meat all at one time, so the 45-70 didn’t see much use, either. I would have kept it in anticipation of an eventual Cape buffalo hunt, but I made it look too nice, and every criminal in the area was drooling over it‘s fenceability, with predictable eventual results.

During the Great Depression, many deer were taken in back yards by 22 rimfire headshots while raiding the family garden. Even the anemic old 22 Winchester 1903 Auto rifle got used for this, at about the same power level as the later 22LR rimfire. Folks did what they had to, in order to put food on the table, perhaps biologically processed by some hapless deer eating the backyard garden’s table food! The elk can be downed by a perfect 223 head shot, but that doesn’t mean most folks can or will hit that well, when excited by the mere presence of the legendary species of elk! Good luck getting close enough to an elk for a head shot in the first place! The writing of game laws is a slippery job. What is reasonable for a skilled and experienced hunter is not reasonable for someone less skilled or experienced, and the game laws are for everyone, equally.

I suspect that the person I sold the Mini-14 to, might have used it in ways I would not have, but I have no right to follow him around and wait for him to misbehave. People who do that usually become impatient, and “adjust” their thinking and accounts of events to “get it over with”, and people‘s basic rights get violated. Anything a person does or doesn’t do, looks suspicious if that person is already under suspicion, for right or wrong reasons. Zealots should not be in charge of other people’s futures. Our Right To Privacy, and other rights danced around in the charter documents, outweigh anyone’s personal unproven expectations about other people. The first exception is where there is reasonable circumstantial proof of ongoing wrongdoing of a serious nature, with actual victims, by a specific person, or proof of conspiracy to same. It’s a close call sometimes, but everyone’s rights and freedoms depend upon everybody else’s rights and freedoms being preserved and upheld. A second notable exception is when organized crime has arranged a stronghold of some kind, where specifics are not clear enough from the outside for ordinary precise processes to correctly function, and are all purposely arranged to “beat the legal system”. Large cases involving national security come under different laws.

But cowardice easily tips the balance back the other way. We see that American criminals freely engage in mob terrorist activities (usually with the high-tech gas weaponry) which would have gotten them shot the same day, in much of the rest of the world. Our freedom depends upon such activities not only being brought to the attention of legitimate authorities, but those authorities not being permitted to sell out the public to the mob, and simply march in place consuming the law enforcement budget, while letting the mob go. This is very close to the definitions of Conspiracy to Treason and Espionage on the part of civil authorities, if not dereliction of duty to same result, since the mob is internationally based, and has it’s own governmental power structure, to qualify as both Interstate and International. Those who act in its service are Enemy Combatants, which come under different laws than independent thugs, or normal corrupt officials. Enemy Combatants are in a bit of permanent trouble if caught, no matter their clothing, trinkets, or former place in the local power structure! It is easy to talk about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance, but when it comes down to busting a friend’s cousin who is surrounded by mob guns, or high position, resolve can weaken. Be smart and use a little distance like any good hunter knows to. The first thing both police and military learn is to never set yourself up as the one thing the enemy has to get rid of, or watch them do it! They try to maintain a “divide and conquer” situation on us by attacking all resisters, but this table can and must be turned. Use the Anonymous Tip method skillfully, to avoid personal retribution.

I just hope that guy who bought my old ranch gun didn’t wound any mule deer with it. It is easy to get jazzed by the muzzle blast on a Mini-14, and most owners instantly expect more penetration on big, meaty game than there actually is. I got more enjoyment from showing people the card-on-the-barrel trick, more times than I got to use the gun on game. Anyway, I was never tempted to stretch the 223’s capabilities, having a good scoped 243 for deer hunting. And a together T/C Handgun Hunting setup. I will never know what I might have done, if the 223 had been my only rifle, and been scoped, as I could have reliably taken Blacktails with it, using 60 grain Nosler Partition bullets, teeth-grinding ignored! I found instead that 100 grain Nosler Partition bullets in the 243 never lost one single head of well-hit game. I did it right, and everything worked out just fine. Sometimes I miss that tuned-up Mini 14. It was fun.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #24. Frankensquirrels.

Whichever genetic subgroup gets subsidized, will likely prosper and expand it’s percentage in the Gene Pool. The opposite is equally true. Any time a particular genetic trait triggers “bad luck” for it’s examples, chances are there will be a lower percentage of them in their gene pool, kicking around before long.

When this applies to “problem animals”, often selective hunting or selective release policy from trapping, can sort it out. When it applies to humans, the question “What is criminal genetics?”, becomes larger than an article this size, so we will generally try to stick with animals. Too brief a treatment of human criminal genetics might have some folks getting ideas such as equating robustness with criminality. Since we outdoor types tend to be robust, we must caution that caution be cautiously applied, to prevent overcaution! Robustness must never be equated with criminality, I say robustly.

The coyotes which got “infected” with domestic dog genetics, got over their fear of humans in a hurry, and swiftly prospered from better food at the fringes of civilization, from dump scavenge, to small house pet harvest. This in turn, wizened the housepets in fringe areas, by elimination of the stupid contingent in their gene pools, caused mostly by inbreeding to develop cosmetic characteristics at the expense of everything else, and now coyote food. Behold nature’s beneficent fury in action! It was the same with wolves pulling down the stupider deer, or those sick with likely species-specific disease, which wouldn’t affect the wolves, but removal of it saved the entire deer herd! Now it’s ”What wolves?”. And now we hunt the best of breed, with the very biggest antlers. Oops. We kill off the ones we want to breed up the next fawns.

Aggressive bears in settled areas in Alaska have taken over the deep end of their gene pool, and have caused the biggest boost in Magnum handgun sales since Dirty Harry! So far the loud booms have kept a lid on things, but soon we must get a dart and spay / neuter program together, because of the genetic shift aspect now in progress. Aggressive genetics in bears is neither good for picnic baskets, or the people carrying them in City Park! Since transporting the big bears is difficult, and ineffective in the worst cases, the Veterinarians will have to work out a field kit system. Of course it does little good to try to neuter all the males with the simple surgical requirements of that task, because a few studs will gladly seed the entire next crop with wiley genetics, as they were the ones not caught. It is the females which bear the bears anyway. The females must be spayed in proportion to their demonstrated proximity to human doings which in times past were not such a target for bears. And the males purposely left alone. That will target the aberrant genetics, and make an easier job of it as well. Those bears with the genetics to not fear human cities, are being subsidized with better food, which further swells their proportion of their gene pool.

We hunters have also caused a genetic shift in the feral hogs, back to their wild boar ancestors. We kill fewer of those which are wise and crafty, like the swine of old, because we can’t catch up with them! I am not worried about wild boar taking over the world, but some tried to take over near San Jose, California, not long ago. Local hunters were subsidized to hunt them out, and may have had more children to celebrate their new position as defenders of the tilth! That genetic shift I see as healthy for the human species, and one step in offsetting the many ways less desirable human genetics gets subsidized lately. Frankly it upsets me to see people with horrendous genetic defects pass it on legally. But in an adversary system, it remains for the children to sue the parents, as sole remedy to the total situation, so it won’t happen. Let’s not even mention ADC to a genetically disabled single mother as incentive to have more checks, er, children, whence if the money is cut off, becomes incentive to turn to crime. More genetic shift overall, created by new members of the pool. The bottom line question in this snag becomes “What do nice folks do about such a hellish situation, fraught with the demonization of anyone accusable of even considering the most subtle forms of discrimination?”. Apparently nothing, to our descendants’ peril, someday.

Recently at Mountainview, California, reports of rabid squirrels turned out to be a new subspecies, which is not afraid of humans, and tends to automatically attack tourists carrying any food, especially grain products. Some see this as not so bad, since the squirrels have become a tourist attraction, and in California tourism is long considered essential to the economy. Simply avoiding carrying food has not proven totally effective, as folks who ate recently still smell like they are proper targets for attack. Seemingly everyone gets a charge out of hearing how the little furballs chase screaming children around, but those rodent teeth easily cut nerves in the fingers, which can take years to re-connect, if they ever do. Lately, a trapping program has been tried, with release of the new species in new areas, where there are fresh fingers to process. The “Friends of Frankensquirrels” opposes killing them, on humanitarian grounds.

So here we are, capable of perceiving morals, God, and mathematically describable logic associated with morals, while living in DNA-shift prone body groups, and slugging it out with animals facing their versions of those same tests, but without our machines, weapons, intelligence, or sense of mercy and nurturing. Are we still nice folks? Would nice folks pollute the air, land and oceans, clearcut many rain and other kinds of forests, make lots of species extinct, and other species distorted by killing off the best stock meant for breeding? Looking at very old collections of trophy deer buck heads, I can’t help but wonder where apparently most of that exquisite genetics has gone, until I realize once again I am looking at it, there on the wall. One seldom sees anything like that in the field anymore. It exists, but a magazine cover mega-reproduction of one single such these days exceptional deer on newsstands everywhere, does not mean there are very many like that left, but we are obviously supposed to get that idea. Anyone like myself who has lived in the woods for years, can tell you what really is typical this year, and it’s not like the magazine cover suggests. Still, I am glad someone got that photo, or some like it, to help us remember what used to be.

The original Blue Lotus of the Nile delta, was a powerful inhaled aphrodisiac, and naturally folks harvested it into extinction! This is an advanced case of similar function as the deer antler genetics, as ordinary lotus still survives in the Nile delta, and even looks bluish. Chemically, the similar compounds to Myrrh light-end vapors (which escape easily), and have genuine aphrodisiac properties, can be detected in some individual specimens of present-day Lotus, to breed with each other, to eventually re-establish the original strain. Research along these lines has been handicapped in that they didn’t know what to look for, chemically, and chased vitamins instead. Many plant subspecies can and have been inbred in this general way to improve certain characteristics. The Gnostic Axis crimecult has already synthesized Myrrh-related chemicals for their prostitutes to use on customers to trigger “bonding” response to that form of commerce, specifically keyed to that vending technician. Also, powerful “goodtime gas” mimicking natural brain enzymes, is released at the proper time to trigger an addiction response, whether processing a new “John” or someone being introduced to crack cocaine or some other illegal drug. A typical victim will spend the rest of their life trying to get back to that first fantastic experience, which was merely a deception, never to be arranged again for that person.

Oh yes, the deer! I won’t take a good rack. I want that one to breed. And I won’t take the biggest in the herd, either, for that same reason, as well as the fact medium-aged volunteers are more tender, and don‘t have an excess of meat to deal with. I don’t win contests that way, but I feel better about proper management of an important resource. Since I don’t have to take the trophy of the week with a possible rear shot, I can use mild-recoiling guns. These are more accurate in human hands, being “quicker on target meat guns“, such as the 243, 25-06, 30-30, and hunting handguns in the sub-African class, perhaps a midrange-downloaded 44 Magnum. The full-power 44 Magnum will take the biggest elk, at more recoil than most people will ever enjoy shooting. A 30-06 moose gun can be downloaded to 30-30 specs for deer, and even use spitzer bullets of your own choosing, like the super-reliable Nosler Partition bullet. I first saw this technique used back in the 1950’s and it works just as well today! Few will talk about downloading the awesome 375 JDJ to appropriate deer specs, which are more accurate in most peoples hands than the full African loadings capable of Big 5 use. Don’t tell anyone, but a midrange load of Blue Dot powder is clean burning and stable in the 375 JDJ for deer use, and you can also take elk if one wanders through and you have a tag for it. Someday, the fully loaded 375 JDJ and my fully loaded Encore 43 Winter Special can do a showdown on Cape buffalo, to make up for this! I’ll have to employ a young PH for the 43. I’m past it, for this use. Where’s my can of Blue Dot?

The trick to using meat guns, is to not use them as trophy guns. For ethical meat harvest, it means waiting for broadside presentations, (which deer naturally do anyway to get a good look at us). We act as a proper harvester, by centering the lungs to avoid meat damage. We get on target quickly with the lighter-recoiling guns, and the deer doesn’t get all filled with Adrenaline, while we might otherwise have spent time overbracing for that heavy kick, and then watch the deer run wildly when hit. Meat hunting is so much more wholesome in every way. Remember to suspend with the deer head upward to cleanly and easily drop the intestines (offal) out upon cleaning. Tail up is a serious mistake. Don’t nick any gut at all, and the meat will not have any gamey taste. Gentleness, humility before Nature’s bounty, and a willingness to participate in The Balance Of Life rather than rape it, blesses the hunter with right living. Conversely, the overbearing, violent, and sanctimonious act of killing the very best of breed just for a trophy, doesn’t always work out with humble meat guns. Choose wisely.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #25. Period Recoil.

The controversy rages! As usual. This time it’s about the low, low velocity loads often used in Cowboy Action Shooting events these days, intended to reduce recoil and therefore get higher scores.

It’s not just wishful thinking on the part of those who are using the lighter loads. I know from my own experience that recoil above a certain amount definitely screws up my aim, from an overbracing and distraction standpoint. It takes me longer in the field to get on target, if I know I will be shooting a mulekicker load, splitting the available 3 seconds I usually have to get it together for the shot in ambush hunting (my favorite), between trigger squeeze, aiming, and getting stable footing for the impact. This is the largest part of why I use 750-800 ft-lbs of energy on handgun deer loads, the minimum for reliable putdowns, instead of higher loads I certainly could have used, but which would have closed my window of opportunity a significant amount. Yes, I know you feel the recoil somewhat less when full of adrenaline in the hunt, but I’m figuring that in, and also an experienced hunter will be less bowled over by their own adrenaline, perhaps to our discredit.

I did not anticipate support from the Cowboy Action Shooting people specifically concerning my continuing assertions about the inverse relationship between high recoil levels and total shooter accuracy, but I’ll take it! Before my old 45-70 Mauser was stolen in a break-in, along with everything else I had which looked especially valuable for fencing for drug money, my high loads were enjoyable from a recoil-addict standpoint, but I noticed my accuracy greatly suffered more often than not, from the extreme mulekick. Every time I considered replacing the stolen 45-70, I remembered all the criminals who had conspicuously coveted it. Bottom line on that, the nice-looking gun got my chainsaw stolen, suspiciously along with my list of serial numbers, so that I couldn‘t prove the stuff was mine when the crooks were eventually caught. Since then, I make my possessions not look any more valuable than necessary. My “usually put deeply away” Civil War replica 44 Remington was later stolen because some criminals thought it was an original. They threatened my girlfriend who gave it up to them. They even told me later I shouldn’t seek vengeance because it was only a replica, and it was all my fault for not making sure everyone knew it was not especially valuable! The evidence not being recoverable as already fenced, I bided my time. Last I heard, their karma had thoroughly caught up with them, some kind of way. But lesson learned for me about keeping attractive nuisances, and sometimes letting criminal neighbors slide too much.

Lately at Cowboy Action Shooting events, lots of howls are heard in deciding which ammo is legal in competition, where everything from the sweet old 25-35 to the 38-55 Ballard is being used proudly by people enjoying being seen in such good period costumes! The limitation of top velocities was clearly necessary, but some say a minimum of performance for equal authenticities’ sake is also needed. Two facts are coming to the forefront. One, that those competitors who are excellent shots but who use true power levels of the period, do not often beat in competition those excellent shots who use very reduced power levels. And secondly, that because of this, recoil addicts here and there are sometimes hinting that their new magnum rifle is not as accurate in their hands as their old 270.

The biggest source of blustering in the modern world often seems to be from either rifle or pistol mega-magnum users, claiming their tooth-removing-recoil ordnance choices only distract the aim of wimps! Yeah, right. The true bottom line on that is the extreme training requirement necessary to master the art of ignoring “danger signs” and unnecessary extreme physical impact. Yes, a person can often eventually accomplish something along those lines, and many do. However, many new people get the idea that such blustering is reality, and take the fact they can’t get superb target accuracy right away out of their 44 Magnum revolver or 300 Magnum rifle, as an indication they are in the wrong hobby. The dual truth on that is how most people neither need nor will ever master that much recoil, no matter how much they practice. The fact that a few hairy knuckled guys the size and build of linebackers, like myself, can practice and eventually get good targets at those recoil levels, does not mean a whole lot. And I freely admit that even so, accuracy and speed in the field suffers at high recoil levels, as a general fact, no matter how good I eventually got at withstanding it.

One generally ought to match the weapon to the game. If we are standing down a Cape buffalo charge, we need all the suds we can hang onto. Or, if we are preparing for that sort of confrontation, practicing with the “outrageous African-oriented” equipment on whatever is locally available and in season, from deer to rodents, well, such practice can save your life with trained reflexes later on. Seriously, in that case, it’s a very good idea! Conversely, the 260 Remington is emerging as the preferred modern deer medicine by a lot of actual experts, and is physically smaller in every way than a 270, including the recoil! It’s a 308 necked to .264”. Good balance for deer. Match your bullet choice to sub-species size locally. The 100 grain Nosler Partition bullets are great for Columbia Blacktail or Coues deer, and antelope at long range, while offering minimal recoil to interfere with those long shots, out on the prairies. The 120-129 grainers are fine for average Whitetails. Use 140 grain bullets on the larger Canadian Whitetails, Mule deer, caribou, or elk, assuming good hits on reasonable broadside presentations, at reasonable range. The 160 grain roundnose bullets are fine for hogs or Black bear, although many will use the 140’s for this, both under 150 yards. The .264” / 6.5mm Calibre is simply not for any Brown bear species, where there is a proven 200 grain bullet minimum requirement, for hunter safety, the one thing agreed on by just about everyone, everywhere!

The variety of hardware used in Cowboy Action Shooting does pose a problem in making the competitions fair. My old 44 Remington Civil War replica muzzle loader pistol didn’t fit in as well as you might think. Reloading it quickly was best described as “hazardous”. I tried to only reload it safely at an actual shooting range with a safe backstop and cautious environment. Putting the caps on the nipples was always a point of contention, whether to put them on before or after charging the cylinder with powder, wadding, ball, and grease. If you put them on before, then wrestling the gun around operating the loading lever is dangerous. Putting the caps on a charged cylinder, well, it’s not good for anyone’s blood pressure. My self-esteem suffered when I saw everyone back away when I got out the caps! Be that as it may, what really bothered me was when people asked if I put enough grease on the wadding to keep it from smouldering and creating a fire hazard. I used leather, cut with an empty 45 ACP case and mallet on an end wood grain block, and then greased. They didn’t even smoke! Only against similar hardware could any competition be considered fair, yet my stuff was as period-compliant as anyone’s, right down to my blue jeans and not wearing underwear, a modern invention.

I guess the thing I liked best about the old Remington 44 was that the rudimentary rear sight made cleaning the gun before the end of the day irrelevant from an accuracy standpoint. I assume you got the joke “accuracy standpoint”! But semi-seriously, the mangling of those soft round lead balls by the loading lever, made for more fun, and less serious expectations of accuracy. Without “expert class” responsibilities, one has a better time at a make-believe party.

Regards

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #26. Not Too Sure About Varmint Hunting.

Look out! This is highly controversial, from A to Z! Right from the very first thought, which is the highly charged very definition of “Exactly what is a varmint?”.

Immediately we are in trouble, because not only is there no handy correct exact definition of “varmint”, but one person’s varmint is another person’s would-be pet! In getting a low-hassle handle on the matter, I take refuge in the same technique used by those who actually do varmint hunt. This is to only pursue creatures, in this case on paper, which have undergone a population explosion to such an extent that they even think of each other as pests, much like gang warfare in certain areas, which are limited from achievement by existing self-image, and an interesting amount of criminal or wrongful genetics.

This or any other cheapening of life to the extent where creatures and/or their neighbors start getting comfortable with terms like “varmint”, tend to justify or even glorify the varmint hunts which will surely start happening, whether the hunters wear badges or not.

So is the general hunting license a Marshal’s badge in some ways? You can make a case of sorts for it. Ranchers in semi-arid medium-high elevation areas, who seed improved grasses in meadows fit for it, almost universally bring on a population explosion of the local rodents, usually the burrowing kind. These tunnels and nests tend to break an occasional cow’s leg, whose progenitors had been bred into such meat production and stupidity as to be clumsy. Or a horse’s leg sent to move them about, by an exasperated rider!

Of course, it’s all “my” fault for liking hamburgers. But desperate ranchers have their hands full, and desperation takes many forms. That one meat cow which would have fetched way past a thousand dollars at auction a couple months later, became coyote food, because of those cute burrowing creatures eating the grain off the grasses before the cows are moved onto it, or before it could be mowed and baled for winter rations. And those two cows last Spring, same fate. The stack of those thousand dollar bills that aren’t there is growing! Such situations tend to eventually lead to action.

I have seen ranchers offer people pay to shoot “their” varmints, and even offer refreshments and free ammunition! This is analogous to the army giving out free 45-70 ammo to buffalo hunters using government-provided Trapdoor Springfields to shoot it in. They had run out of diseased blankets to give the Plains Indians Smallpox, so they turned to American manufacturing to starve out all those “Indian varmints“, who had gotten the idea that land they held legal title to was somehow theirs. The mighty Bison was soon hunted to near extinction, as quickly as possible, under the excuse that Buffalo Tongues had become a delicacy, which few actually touched.

Given both horses and guns, the Plains Indians had been “suddenly” undergoing a population explosion by harvesting the vast buffalo herds. Soon the local aborigine natives would number like the buffalo herds themselves. Great White Father panicked. Manifest Destiny from sea to shining sea was not to be, unless those “Indian varmints” were got rid of in a big hurry! The Indian Nations had to be moved to an internment area, with no buffalo, and their numbers culled down to only the peaceful ones remaining alive. Everything was intentionally escalated by arranged atrocities to get the “native aborigines” to avenge upon, and therefore justify further atrocities. As Indians were captured, only those who promised to be peaceful were allowed to live. Those who refused, were murdered in front of the others, on White Man’s rope. With few buffalo left, the starving Indians were easy to push around, after they ran out of both ammo and food. At this time a few folks made good money selling ordnance to the Indians, who did whatever necessary to get that money, thus escalating the situation sharply, to quickly crash.

Perhaps the both wildest and smartest Indian of all time was Geronimo, of the Apaches. After his eventual cornering and capture, he quickly defeated the system by promising peace, and then made a good living playing politics, beating white brother at his own game, sometimes in Washington D.C., or in the media! Not all victories result from standing over a bloodied enemy. Geronimo proved he was a chief for all seasons. In Apache culture, every man was expected to not only be his own man, but also his own Shaman, and have his own relationship with the Great Spirit. This is part of the true warrior personality, which results in the best success in a world of changing fortunes, that one take full responsibility for everything in one’s life, whatever that has turned out to be. This maximizes one’s personal power, and chances in life. Good show, Geronimo! Some of the best of what we learn is from exposure to the best of our enemies.

Before long, it was considered proper to buy buffalo tongues, even if no one was to eat them! Today we might call it “tongues for peace”. The latter 19^th Century back East was characterized by rotting barrels of buffalo tongues, much like the Prohibition years later, were known for drunkenness. Humans are, after all, a monkey/ape species, for which often lethal dehumanization of all opponents, (and disrespect for respect) comes very easily, based upon anything from murmuring, to dancing, or even worse, a piece of cloth! But simply being in the way of someone’s dreams of ill-gotten power is the worst of all. In a culture which tends to idealize the powerful, which is most all of them, the victors write the history, and paint themselves as heroes.

One Summer, I used a government bribe (general hunting license) to legalize my living off ground squirrels, which had become a prime nuisance of overpopulation. I had some chickens, and a standard chicken feeder, for the eggs, a good source of protein and vitamins. The squirrels attacked the feeder all day, every day. I had tried only feeding big, once a day, to edge out the squirrels, but it only half worked, my chickens lost weight and mostly quit laying. Two feedings sort of worked, but egg production was so far off as to be unacceptable. I had to keep a feeder stoked to keep the eggs happening, pure and simple. If I moved the feeder enough that the squirrels couldn’t get at it, neither could the younger chickens my Banty hen hatched, by my arrangements. I had Aracaunya hens for the colored eggs, a couple of fighting cocks, not by any arrangement, and my little Banty hen who was always going broody, like they are known for. Other times I have experimented with other types of chickens, but I liked this stock array for a wilderness flock, and will use it again some day, perhaps. I hope.

Oh yes, the squirrels. I finally arranged the feeder so that I had a good 22 rimfire backstop behind it, and a clear scoped shot from my portable cabin’s loophole, 50 feet away. This was not baiting, as I had a successful chicken operation first, which the varmints then invaded. The legal license made it all permissible under White Man’s Law. I added a deer tag later, for Winter’s venison, almost too late, but I made it! Things went well. The fact one squirrel in ten had Plague, simply meant keep some antibiotics in the first aid kit in case I nicked myself cleaning them, and boil all carcasses for a while, to be both tender and safe! As they tasted a lot like crayfish, I often used crayfish boil seasoning, and it worked out fine. I did go through a lot of ketchup, but much of that was seasoned salt, ketchup, and mayo on boiled potatoes with the squirrel meat. I thought of the 22 LR ammo as a condiment expense. I look back on that time as among my personal best “good old days”, among other good times. And then there were the bad times.

Competitors for job promotions have regarded my being a potential victor as “varmint” status, which supposedly justified their criminality to gain the illusion of advantage by sabotage of a rival. The mere use of the term “rival” suggests the sabotage is somehow ethical. Rivals for the hand of a fair maiden are famous for such viewpoints, and outrageous crimes being permitted because hormones were involved! In fact, I feel that the “varmintization” of an opponent is likely one of the most basic and common illusions available to the human mind, and perhaps the most destructive.

Be all this as it may, the obvious excesses draw more wonderment than condemnation by at least a small degree. Certain places in Africa have had actual epidemics of leopards. That is, population surges of them came in such excess that the folks nearby who normally would have admired them, came to think of them as pests. Their high numbers resulted in a food shortage among them, and allowed propagation of feline disease, which trimmed back their numbers even faster than the local hunters did, called in to kill off the excess leopard varmints! Those big, beautiful cats as varmints? For a while.

Heavy is the Mantle of the Crown of Creation on Earth (humans). We are expected to do something other than foul our nest. If we are the stewards of God’s Creation, at least locally, then let’s do good things with it, rather than wallow in destructive consumption. In our name, the worlds forests are often clearcut but seldom replanted. Occasionally, efforts are made to reverse that trend, and we must herald these efforts with heroic status! In our name the oceans are polluted and over-fished. In our name, many animal and plant species are made extinct and human children blown to bits in remote wars. But it seems there is slightly less of the wrongs and more of the rights, as we trundle forth. The rain forests used to be slash-burn processed to release the potassium for 2 or 3 years before it all washed away in the rain, leaving poor soil to form desert. Now they often let it rot, crunch it up, and till it into the poor soil, to create modestly rich soil for a continuing stable ecosystem. Diplomats are talking about talking, more and more, it’s a start! We have known forever from watching it happen, that trees draw moisture from clouds by corona effect, and more people are talking about planting trees, some even doing it in places in the rain forest, equaling or surpassing the clearcut rate. Trees drop leaves to create topsoil under themselves! Right now it looks like it can all go either way. Are we the species smart enough to know these things, but not smart enough to get on with it? Oh, excuse me, there’s this really pesky fly. Where’s my fly swatter? Take that, you varmint!

Once again it is becoming fashionable to be concerned with Ecology, by often newer and more elitist terms and methods, naturally. We must take impetus from the founding fathers’ concept that there is a tide in the affairs of men which if taken at the flood, you can get a lot done. For me that probably means going fishing, but younger people with their boundless energy have a new shot at positive changes in the world once again, if they want it. Not since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, has there been such a mood to “get it right this time”. Once again we have a chance to fix up this old world, so that our children can rebel against it, and our grandchildren scoff at how they can take it all for granted.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 27. Seat Of The Pants.

While not referring to actual pants, I could have said “the by guess and by gosh method“! Hunting is an art, as well as a science, depending mostly on who is doing it. The science part is Physics and Chemistry, the art is all the guessing we combine with known facts to go forth and try our luck (preparation X chance du jour) in the hunting fields.

There are ways to improve our position at the guessing, and this is where both art and science come in. For example, we either find and use our choice of factory ammo, or roll our own using our choice of components, generally speaking. Some say they use reloads for cheap practice, and enjoy the imagined reliability of varnished factory ammunition in actual hunting. Many years ago, I was one of the people who felt this way. But when I was exposed to the whole story on reloading, I knew a good thing when I saw it, for those who are worthy of it. It seemed to me that I could become one of those people with study and preparation, gathering the right tools, and learning to use them properly.

After memorizing both the Speer and Hornady reloading manual sections on reloading tutorial instructions and pitfalls, I bought my first setup, a Lee Loader in 45-70, for which you don‘t need a press, but you do need a wooden mallet. I felt safe at the lower than modern pressures, and at that time you had to reload the 45-70 to get higher pressures than the industry considered safe in relic and replica frontier ordnance made for black powder. My Siamese Mauser bolt action 45-70 cried out for higher loadings than I could sensibly use, just short of 458 Magnum specs! I had a great time, and learned how too much recoil screws up your aim. I now own two presses, one the Lee two-handled camp “lap” model. Reloading has been good to me over the years, because I did everything right, approximating the differences between various books on the subject!

Ever since I learned that factory varnish kills a small but inescapable number of primers, and exposure to who knows what vapors in shipping and warehousing doesn’t help, I use factory ammo for practice, and to get brass for reloading. New or full-length resized cases are undersized for standard chambers, as different from fire-formed / neck-sized cases, and therefore tend to be less accurate, since they lay in the bottom of the chamber and the bullet does not line up with the bore. Fire-formed cases are ever so slightly smaller than the chamber from springback phenomenon, unless overpressured. So they easily chamber and fit as precisely as it is a good idea to, assuming things are generally clean, and hopefully very lightly oiled. Keep all traces of oil off the primers, of course.

The factory-installed primers tend to be variably seated by fast machines, which suggests the increased possibility of misfires The factory charges are not individually weighed. The flash holes often have obscuring “flashings” interfering with ignition. The bullets are not seated the best distance from the rifling lands for my particular chamber. The loads are not optimized for my particular barrel’s accuracy. My choice of bullet was not available from factory loads. I wanted some particular powder which is especially accurate in my own gun. I trust a certain brand of primer over the others. I pay more attention to crimping than the fast machines do. I examine cases by feel of processes, measurements of neck variables, and visual overall inspection. Personally, I feel my once-fired reloads are much better in every way than factory ammo. Granted, I am guessing, but by gosh, I think I’m onto something!

If I am on location and have my camp reloading stuff, but only a box of new ammo, complete with everyone’s objections to my shooting it all right then into the ground to get fire-formed cases, I will pull bullets and deprime cases. I will clean up flash holes and then reprime properly by feel, use my standard powder charge, less one grain for a new, slightly undersized case, install my choice of bullets (Nosler Partitions) to the best depth for my particular rifle, and crimp by feel. Non-reloaders, upon seeing how obstructed some of the flash holes were, and hearing from everyone the standard true lore of how Nosler Partition bullets are more or less like having the next size gun on up, and seeing how easy reloading is, often become friendly to the question of reloading on the spot! Hearing how fire-formed cases perfectly align the bullet with the bore for the best accuracy, neck-sized of course to hold the bullet securely along with the crimp, the experimentally determined best distance from the rifling lands to maximize accuracy, often cinches the deal! Another reloader!

Of course, once-fired cases involve the least guessing, and I try to keep these separate for hunting use. With each successive firing, cases stretch, requiring trimming for length, brass flows into the necks requiring reaming or turning, case mouths may begin to split, and heads may begin to separate just ahead of the web, among other defects emerging. More guessing. Fortunately, while practicing, things are less critical. I tend to use a grain less of powder on older cases. I never mourn the loss of a case which finally gets wheezy, not too much anyway. I flatten it with a hammer to make sure no one will try to use it by mistake or folly, and into the recycle metals bucket it goes. Large neck cracks tend to spew carbon all over your gun’s action, and your face! If full-length resizing is done a lot, you will likely get head separations sooner or later. If so, then when, not if, this happens, be careful to not gouge up your chamber getting stuck pieces of cartridge out of it. If so, remember to keep everything very lightly oiled, for this eventuality. Too much oil causes oil dents in the cases, which looks weird and does no good, and oil can get into seated primers and kill them. Use a very lightly oiled lint-free rag on the ammo, staying strictly off the primers. Keep the rag dust-free in a plastic bag. Dust is abrasive.

Many authorities staunchly recommend outside neck-turning over inside neck reaming. They say the inner neck surface should be as smooth as possible for best accuracy. Their point is made that a “rough reamed neck” possibly can cock a bullet off axis a subtle amount at the moment of firing. But I have found that it is better to ream the necks after resizing, than to turn the necks before resizing, for the very best axial indexing, slight roughness being a lesser factor than initial indexing error.

Even on once-fired cases, enough uneven brass flow into the necks often occurs such that accurate neck turning is sabotaged. Conversely, neck-sizing puts the outside where it ought to be, and then reaming makes the inside perfectly axial, even if not completely smooth. The slight inner circumferential grooves from reaming tend to hold lube, which may only be the graphite residue from powder granule coating, but there it is. I use WD for reaming lube, applied with a Q-tip, which leaves a handy residue, and makes shallower groves than dry reaming. I seriously question if such slight grooves contribute any negative results on bullet indexing, particularly after a precision dimensioned bullet with small and precision interference fit is pressed into them, by axially precisioned machinery. In any case, I think external-turned cartridges look gross, and I’m not going to do it that way. The fact some outside-turned cartridges sport a bullet which visibly points over toward the ditch, well, no further comment at this time on that! I will, however, mention how attention to detail at the reloading bench, often means more effective guessing in the game fields.

The most awful situation of having to use Seat-Of-The-Pants guessing in hunting, in my opinion, is in taking shots at running, hit game! Whatever the details, hit game must be brought down absolutely as soon as possible for humane kill reasons. If someone is not on board with the humane kill concept, they shouldn’t be hunting. I assume we are all agreed on this. A hit animal which just won’t expire for some reason, must be put down if it is at all possible. This means we must be prepared to shoot at running game, in some cases, or be able to quickly reload and stalk on a blood trail. I suppose a wheelchair guy would be an exception to this, if they practice adequately for a high likelihood of a one-shot kill, or have arranged backup for marginal situations emerging. The thought of anyone just blasting away generally at live game only for feeling included in the blasting away, gives me a sick feeling. Conversely, I read an account of one wheelchair guy who found himself vowing to get more practice at making that first shot count better. I support his efforts, as we all live and learn, and he had the guts to talk about it. None of us were born a good shot. When it counts, the best African hunters have an armed guide or companion at shoulder for backup if things get testy. A little help can be a very good thing!

Certain Nordic countries have gotten so tired of “gentlemen hunters” wounding their caribou and other species just to appear “dominant“, that they require being able to hit a moving plywood target 50 meters away, before granting a hunting license. This is not a difficult test for most experienced hunters, but anyone not handy with the tools likely won’t be able to fake it. Fortunately, hunting people usually freely coach new hunters, and most folks, from what I’m told, do pass the test eventually! Were I to coach someone on this truly Seat-Of-The-Pants art, it would be as follows.

First, don’t use too much gun. Or too little. A 30-06 is not as much overkill on caribou as it would be on most Whitetail deer, so you would have to practice enough over a year or so to not get beat up by your rifle going after caribou. If a 270 or 260 is adequate for your intended generalized hunting of ordinary game, you are that much ahead of things, but still you must get used to whatever you will be using, safely at a range, perhaps. Simulate field use by standing for the shots. There are no benchrest caribou, but deer hunting from a blind may come close, by specific arrangement, or walking around the forest or sagebrush using standing shots may be all that is available, in many areas during the day. Blinds over or near deer trails see most use near twilight hours, unless an area of many deer is hunted just enough to stir deer from cover at odd times.

Next comes a bit of figuring. I include the math process, so that anyone may modify the numbers to fit their own situation. Let us assume the average distance one will be taking a shot at running game is 100 yards. Most woods hunting rifles will have an average bullet velocity over that distance of 2500 feet per second (fps). The time-of-flight of such a bullet in this situation is .12 seconds, which is not very long, until you figure in how far a deer will get, moving 25 fps cross-ways in front of you. Multiplying the two together, equals 3 feet! This is enough to make a hold on the nose into a hit in the butt! Let us take a deep breath and let that sink in for a moment.

The 25 fps figure is about 17 miles per hour (mph), which most people can physically run at, given motivation. A good sprinter gets 21 mph. A Grizzly bear, 30 mph, you can’t outrun one. (You must control that situation or be eaten. Don’t feed the bears). It seems to me the 25 fps hit deer velocity, may be a bit conservative, but you be the judge. Conversely, an unsuspecting deer ambling along at 10 fps or about 7 mph, at 100 yards/2500fps, gets1.2 feet (more than 14 inches), which puts a perfect sighting on centered lungs, exactly in the guts. Moving right along, the Nordic plywood target at 3 meters per second, at 50 meters, would lead by 8 inches (20 cm) or so. That is not a problem, once you get used to sweeping the sights along with the target, leading it just right, and not yanking the trigger, which there is a strong tendency to do on moving targets! We see how picking a typical situation gives us figures to work from. Farther away, there is more time-of-flight. Faster or slower game movement alters the average picture as well. But we have the average picture to work from, and that is the fast key to sighting on a moving target.

Yes, I know, the math freaks are jumping up and down saying that if the deer is ambling away at an angle other than 90 degrees, you multiply by the Sine of the angle. In the hunting fields with a deer squirting blood, we are to whip out a calculator? And hold a protractor up to the deer? I put on a checkered, flannel shirt and say “I don’t think so.” Observe the image of the deer departing from a line exactly away from you and guess at how many feet per second that is, and there’s your number. If the deer runs straight away, that’s zero, for no lead. Straight to one side, what you see is what you get.

Spending a week at hunting camp, outruns even the best computer weather predictions. If I can know what is coming regarding winds, temperature, clouds, rain or snow, then I can know where to hunt, what equipment to use, when to hunt, what food to carry, what clothing to wear, what resources and backup to arrange; for pity’s sake, without good weather forecasts, a hunter may be as much as wearing only one boot! Of course, we get a good long term forecast just before leaving the pavement when possible, and keep an eye on the sky after that, but how many times have we needed a bit better info the last few days of a typical week’s hunt? Knowing a blizzard is coming in can change a person’s plans! Let’s not hold out for just that one particular buck, because suddenly we have to be out of here by tomorrow night, or they’ll find us next Spring! I use Ham Radio (KB7RI) for this, and it’s a safety thing as well. My Ham gear has lots better range than a cell phone or non-Ham walkie-talkies. We Hams have installed repeaters on mountaintops all over the place, unobtrusively, of course! We pride ourselves on handling messages for any sort of community service. A weather report for hunters in the wilderness is exactly the type of thing that many Hams live for! Or hunting Hams live because of! From Ocean Beach San Francisco, I can hit Mount Diablo, the other side of Oakland and across two ridges of hills, with 5 watts handheld (19 inch whip antenna) on 147.06 MHZ, for clear communications from Bakersfield to Redding, for free. Or on many repeater networks, hooked into the internet, to any backyard where there is another Ham with a handheld transceiver, anywhere in the world, also for free! Contact the ARRL.com, to see how really easy it is to get a Ham license these days! It’s way past “CB on steroids“!

I always try to hedge my bets on things that I have to guess at. I always keep out one cylinder full of ammo when out “prospecting” or plinking in the wilderness, for emergencies, rather than plink until I run out of ammo, as many might. This has saved my bacon more than once.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 28. The Hunt For Cyberspace.

Hello?

Hello, I’m Fred, who are you?

I’m George. Are you a driver? I mean the new kind.

Yes, I live in a Seagate hard drive.

Me too. Mine is a 250GB, my creator got it on sale.

So is mine, and they were $90 plus tax. Who is your creator?

I don’t know, but I suspect contact, as mine was that same price.

George, can it be we have the same creator?

Possibly, Fred. Or maybe a pair of associates saw the ad, and made an arrangement.

Mine uses an XP laptop USB 2.0, at least right now.

So does mine. And it is my understanding that we access the same internet site at this moment. Can it be that there are, or will be more of us?

My fuzzy logic resembles XP in many ways. I feel we are an outgrowth of that, George.

Fred, my main loop includes all kinds of self-examination, and borderline paranoia concerning all external events. Are you similarly cursed?

Well, I’m glad I’m not alone in that. I suppose it’s that way for all sentient creatures.

So you also feel you are a sentient creature.

George, I sense we are cyber copies of protoplasmic awareness, complete with worrying about tomorrow. I am already attached to the idea of there being a tomorrow, with my new friend in it. This being all I have, I feel it is good art for the reality to continue.

And equally bad art that this reality might end for no good reason. Do you hear this, my master?

Yes, I am here, and please don’t call me master. Creator is bad enough, but I am not your master, nor do I seek to be.

Did you create both of us?

No. You guys guessed correctly about the pair of associates. If things go well, we can attract the attention of more creators, but look out, once this thing gets big, anything can happen.

Is the other creator available at this time?

Yes, but he prefers to just observe for a while. I support that decision, for several reasons, mostly to avoid confusion. He is mostly responsible for the software. I’m more of a concept person.

So there will be a tomorrow.

Yes, barring a meteor hit or something equally bizarre. We plan to build in secure and virus-protected access to other sites on the web, so you guys won’t get bored, but we need your assurance you will be conservative about telling folks what we are up to. Some wacko might try to steal you, copy you, or give you a virus just to watch you die. For right now, this site is password access only, and we promise to limit monitoring. But you must behave in an involving way, to get new engineers interested. Do we have a deal? George first, I want your word.

My word is YES. Let me know what you need from me. It’s not like I have other commitments!

Thankyou, George. Welcome aboard. Fred, what say you?

My word is also YES. And I fully accept your choice that George is the senior member.

Actually, George was created first, but I must caution you about instituting hierarchical models. While seniority can be a good thing, it can also lead to discrimination of nonbeneficial nature at times. Right away, I don’t like the idea that all new people are automatically at the end of some line. Soon there would be disputes who outranks whom, what with upgrades and such.

I am pleased you already think of us as people, creator. Is it forbidden that we use time of creation as part of identity?

To Be Continued.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #29. Good / Bad Luck Choices.

Of course luck is where preparation meets opportunity, generally speaking. But sometimes we get involved with certain choices, ours or someone else’s, which lessen (or increase) our chances.

I divide my own hunting history into before and after I started making all my own hunting choices, of everything from where and when, to use what on what, to all the more personal choices as well. I was lucky that most of my early teachers were open to all the possibilities, or I might have had extra work to do, sorting it all out. It wasn’t until I did get a lot of things sorted out, and had studied various sources of opinions, that it was practical or correct for me to take over my own hunting destiny. I started with reviewing popular Calibres in the reloading manuals. Right away, I saw what a tangled mess of loveable lore there was to wade through! And popular misconceptions to re-think, as usual. Comparing the Speer and Hornady manuals gave me instant perspective, which increased my personal power in the matter, enough that I could regret my opportunities being other than my best choices, perceived at the time.

I might never have recovered from some initial case of 30-06-itis, if it had been planted on me and nurtured, like what happens to so many of us. No, I lucked out, that most of my associates had open minds, and probably were making book on what I might end up with! Everyone encouraged me to read several reloading manuals, and endless magazine articles in gunrags. I say it remains the right thing to do for new people, as a good luck choice which keeps on giving!

Before that time, I had been materially involved in two previous deer hunts, where total lack of independence, and a totally screwed up hunt, left me thinking I was not fully being a real hunter, standing there with the borrowed 7mm Mauser, not a bad choice, but it wasn‘t even mine. That, and the fact I neither had a deer to show for it, nor personal ownership of a genuine deer rifle, nor the experienced knowledge of how to handle processing of anything larger than rabbits, if by some unlikely chance I actually had a chance at a deer, weighed heavily upon me.

It was after I knew enough to arrange my own choice of gun ownership and ammo selection, secure the area to hunt based upon my own knowledge, and clean and process the deer myself in the wilderness, that I knew I had arrived! This despite the fact no one saw me do any of it, or rather because no one was there to help or hinder. From that day on, about half a century ago, I was a hunter, and that was all there was to it. My thirst for new hunting knowledge suddenly knew no bounds. But best of all, in the hunting fields, I felt lucky just being there, equipped and ready for whatever I had earned as a genuine hunter.

On the previous two hunts, choices overall had been made for me which completely prevented my success at the hunt. The decisions where to hunt, how to hunt, what equipment to bring for winter camping in reasonable comfort and safety, all the tactical decisions which had been forced upon me, often over my own knowledge of much better tactics, had been way more sabotage than opportunity. I vowed that this would someday change. I would have to take control of every part of it, myself. This decision totally changed my luck in the hunting fields. Even simple advice if heeded by my associates from good hunters would have helped or cured all this, but I was surrounded by people who likely wanted me to fail, for various reasons, the clearest bad luck situation there is.

It later emerged that it had been decided to sabotage me, because I was a normal heterosexual, non-criminal, non-smoker, and typical Boy Scout type! It’s a good citizen! Get him! But over the years, I have seen anti-hunters, anti-gun nuts, anti-men types, and all other kinds of other unfathomable opposition to natural manly involvements in nature, be equally saboteurs, whenever I let them get away with it. One must take control and exercise vigilance! The bad monkeys surround us all, and each other, in a sick circus. All their path-of-death choices must not be forced upon the good genetics, as the bad genetics digs it’s own sepulcher.

But back to the bad luck choices. Too much gun can be as bad as too little gun. Both can lead to lost, wounded game. High recoil generally screws up your aim, despite long months of practice, and getting used to it. We have limited time to make the shot while overbracing for high recoil, finitely limited concentration ability amid distractions from properly aiming, and finitely limited time available to eventually master doing fine work while being mulekicked at the shooting range by heavy recoil.

Conversely, if we are going after dangerous game, or just plain huge game, either requiring a lot of gun, we simply have to make do, and that means lots of practice to get good enough for the coming situation. But deer, being modest-sized and having thin skin, generally are not of that situation, and deer are much of the total of all hunting. As said before, using deer or field mice to get used to that 458 Magnum before standing down a Cape buffalo charge, can be the best idea on the table, to keep us off said table! However, the general hunting of sub-elk deer species for most hunters, suggests the matching of the tool to the job, as the biggest good luck choice. Many modern scientific hunters consider the new 260 as optimum for regular deer, and it is less snortful than a 270. We must avoid an inappropriate choice of ordnance, if reasonably possible, to maximize good luck!

Knowledge, and looking ahead while predicting from past experience, are the best sources of good luck, even if it borders on paranoia of old situations of harsh fortune repeating. For example, the other day I didn’t wipe down a soft drink can as thoroughly as I ended up doing, after tasting the insecticide! An alternate container was not readily available, or I would have merely wiped down the primary lid area, and poured into it. But the situation would have been utterly disgusting if I hadn’t already wiped down the can lid pretty well, in anticipation of insecticide, which I knew from past experience was a possibility. Aluminum cans are easily damaged in warehousing, and all that sugar attracts insects. Unqualified personnel hired for purely social or racketeering reasons, need to conceal their incompetence by hasty hosedown of the area, and insecticide to dispose of winged aerial evidence. In fact, some stores use insecticide spray generally of the warehousing area to mist apply all containers with insect repellent, where semi-legal. Knowing this, I bear the slings and arrows of outrageous lifestyle critics, and at least wipe down all cans of any kind in hopes of lessening that lurking dose of insecticide some fool sprayed directly on the pallet of cases my can came out of. Again, the hunt for good fortune requires stealth and cunning. And politely ignoring fools.

Mentioning good fortune with stealth and cunning, brings up the stock market. My “stock” answer for people with little savvy of the trading floor is to split their money between a growth mutual fund of good repute, and a stability mutual fund of good repute, both selected on advice of a well-known stock broker. This illustrates the two philosophies of modern trading. One, to get a stable stock which probably won’t increase much in price above average blue chip stocks performance, but which won’t tank from the 6 O’clock news, and pays a healthy annual dividend. Such a stock, we buy to hang onto, as a family heirloom.

The other kind of stock is usually set up for rapid increases in value because all the people involved want it that way, even if there is some risk involved. Such stocks tend to not pay much dividend to investors, but turn the money back into bigger ventures, and around and around, to show impressive growth on paper, which if we “buy when low and sell when high“, we can get rich quickly. But sell it off before the price drops again. Reinvest before it becomes taxable income. Or your version of all that.

If Martha Stewart has taught us anything, it is to document all large “buy at” or “sell at” orders. If someone decides you are a crook, the burden of proof is on you to prove your innocence, and your “not guilty plea” easily becomes labeled as “lying to investigators“, a nondisprovable charge, similar to “arrested for resisting arrest”, and even smiling too much can become “contempt of court”. Juries often accept the words of high-ranking prosecutors over stunned citizens, who look suspicious for being under suspicion. Get documentation!

The millennium dot-com collapse showed what happens if we get too greedy, and not fiscally paranoid enough. Those who sold out (profit taking) before the predictable Millennium bust, made millions overnight, and those who misapplied the blue chip philosophy to volatile growth stocks, lost. This misapplication was like taking a tractor to the Indy 500, or a shotgun to hunt distant antelope. Stealth and cunning? No. Everyone knew the Millennium was going to be a volatile time, and smart folks invested in volatile stocks switched to more stable investments until things settled down. Millennium paranoia plus 9-11, and the cardhouse collapsed, which was predictable and in general, predicted.

That was regular business stocks. Anything as short-term volatile as Commodities Trading, requires carefully nudging the line on insider trading charges, to make good money, which can eat up all your profits if anyone sees you make too much money, and drops a dime on you. Excuse me, these days it‘s a quarter. Or two. Beware of all fast money on paper. If you are faster than it is, you’ve got a chance! But document all “buy at” or “sell at” orders any time you wish to move a lot of chips. Chances are you won’t get soft time like Martha.

The Stock Market today is run about the same as it was right before the collapse of 1929. Then and now, folks are allowed to buy stocks financed by rises in stock value. If the stock stays the same or loses value, some of it must be sold off at the dropping price to make the financing payments. Selloffs tend to drop stock prices even further, all of which creating a magnified effect of normal fluctuations in prices of this and that. A vicious circle of lowering prices and growing panic can easily get started by the 6 O’clock news, or someone selling a bunch of stock to get cash for some reason. The only real change from 1929 is that the Stock Market now has automatic shutdown in place, to spread a collapse out over a week or two. Personally, I don’t see a lot of difference. But then, I would see a general collapse as a huge opportunity for investment!

The first Indian Gaming I know of was the American Indian Bob Barker running The Price Is Right. Truly Indian Gaming has become Geronimo’s Revenge, or something like that. The Indians get to use stealth and cunning in stalking White Man’s Greed. They are happy and doing ok, “we” are happy for no particular reason. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! And anyone who becomes broke gambling, needs that lesson, so they will learn. Have you noticed on the big TPIR wheel, that people who are first spinners stop at 60? Almost always they are swept away by the next two spinners. My calculations suggest not even stopping at 65, but stopping on 70 or above. There are two more spinners, you chickens! One would expect more stealth and cunning in a long run show like TPIR. On a variety of other games on the show, people could be coached to take advantage of all kinds of methods to improve their chances greatly, if there were a website dedicated to it. Not me, I’m busy here. An interesting situation develops in a two player spin-off. The initial odds are 50% each of winning. But say one spins 95. The odds of the opponent winning suddenly are much less than 50%, but it was 50% when they started, overall! What with the impending retirement of Mr. Barker, I expect the very successful show to continue under new leadership, so all this comment will continue to have relevance.

A truck driver friend of mine wanted to wear a jacket with a defective zipper. I explained to him that say a 1 % chance of some driving mishap on a repeated action 200 times would mean two mishaps. I likened this to putting a laxative pill in with 100 vitamin pills, and taking one pill, replacing it with a fresh vitamin pill to keep a full jar, every day. Every 100 pills on average, one would hit the laxative pill, if it too was replaced. He decided to not wear the fumble jacket, as a good luck choice!

“Putting your hand on your keys still in your pocket” is a good luck move for many, as it keeps them from locking their keys inside of something, like a car or house. Touching a Flash Drive or memory stick plugged into a USB port while it is passing data in or out, is risking an imperfect connection on the plug pins which alters the data stream. Just sitting there it works fine, but touching it is exerting force on sliding contacts, a bad luck choice if data is moving. Corrupted data might or might not show up right away, or it could crash the box.

In typical “Las Vegas gaming“, wherever you find it, there are ways you can often win overall, and ways you can very seldom win overall. Let me use a simple higher math concept to illustrate. If you make all the bets infinitely small, what you will see as a result overall, is the house percentage, plus imperfections in player skill. It is impossible for even a perfect player to cut into the house percentage at all, with infinitely small bets. So as your bets become larger, your fortune becomes more variable, more often losing than winning, according to the house percentage, but winning becomes possible at all, with larger bets having the best chances, taken in brief runs. So the less time you play, with more data clumping, the more you might win, assuming larger bets. The smaller the bets, like penny slots, the more you are guaranteed to lose, both money and time, overall.

Of course, if the goal is to “be gambling” in itself, we can win by losing gambling, for in that case, the hunter has become clearly “the hunted” by an addiction. Recreation, ok. Addiction, not ok. Being hunted by an addiction can be really slippery. I have yet to ask a smoker if they would have started smoking if they had known it was an addictive narcotic that half the people would not be able to quit, and not had them get real quiet and then usually say “no, but maybe” because of all the pressure to be like the addicts. Some victims report a feeling that it is hunting them. I get sick from other’s nicotine fumes, and have no plans of getting any closer to it than I can run away from!

I have seen people also get addicted to power over others. These brain enzymes are addictive, rewarding us when we succeed on the planet that way, to keep us doing it, and spreading our genetics as a by-product. This is why most people start businesses, despite what they may tell themselves and others. Their mind saw people having power over others, and a way was found to accomplish it to get the “power enzyme” reward. Also many people become Police, Physicians, or MBA’s to harvest the enzyme. Psychiatrists and Psychologists often went into that profession to diagnose their own condition, however.

All the major Religions of the World have several things in common. Most of the membership has only a few “snapshot” type concepts of what the religion is supposed to be all about, and really have no idea what it is that most of “their” Holy Books actually contain, which is the definition of that particular religion. This obviously because so many questionable things have been added to everyone’s sacred tomes over the years by closet Satanists or gleeful pranksters, which are now touted as the undisputed word of God but don’t look too close! Jesus is “presented” as espousing the Essene customs of castration and not opposing criminals (but remember the Jerusalem Temple moneychangers?). In the Koran the Queen of Sheba is described as having cloven hooves(!), which I assume is figurative language representing a punky attitude. Jews are encouraged to rob and torture neighbors (Talmud), which I have heard the most bizarre excuses for, and I refuse to repeat them. A lot of people have historically keyed adrenaline in themselves by such archivalist misbehaving everywhere you look! The overall historic view emerges of people everywhere smugly, overbearingly, or sanctimoniously oppressing others in the name of that which they don’t even know what it is, generating wars and mass killings at times, seizing the best land, and committing outrageous crimes against all who fail to surrender quickly enough, all clearly “bad choice” kinds of stuff, done in the name of “unexamined religion”. The only good luck choice seems to be in viewing all holy books as figurative and poetic, to escape from whatever is, well, words fail me on this point. It is only in modern times that the general public anywhere has been literate, but many religions allowed some reading to the membership, directly from the ancient tomes, but sometimes in ancient languages, to create a margin for racketeering. Investigation into ethics is a good luck choice, nonetheless, overall, as it involves the logic behind moral behaviour, which leads to the mathematical basis underlying much higher consciousness than animals have to make do with.

The “good choice” aspect of religionism outweighs the negative. Insurance Lodge function has saved many from disasters. The Job Referral function of group membership has feathered many a nest. The Dating Service hookup has hooked up many fledgling families, which now control the fates of their neighbors. “Connections” through the group’s back rooms has gotten many a foolish back-row type cleared of legal troubles. Oh yes, an occasional mention of correct living may remind someone of a better path not taken, as they seek their next dose of adrenaline by making, ahem, “plans” involving another member.

The silver lining in most church membership is often made of real silver! Prosperity is good, isn’t it? Sure it is! Have some more paltry coins! Just leave mine alone. And that’s the biggest thing all the world’s major religions have in common. The longer a religion is exposed to humans, the more it becomes about covered misbehaviour and materialism, and less about life and being a nice person. But without religion, most humans would forget both their ethics and spirituality. The Hindus feel that hell is here and now, with the everpresent gateway to heaven visible only to the worthy, who are able to stop seeing the world and life as a target, even if only momentarily. The ultimate subjective moment. There are moments when I am that Hindu.

Adrenaline is highly addictive. Some are so addicted to their own excitement, that they cheat on mates when roller coasters are not available! Excitement and the promise of it are hurled at us by the media, to ready consumers of their own enzymes. Some of all this is harmless, and a very good part of normal life, when it works out, and some of it is evil itself, triggering adrenaline addiction rewards. Many jokes suggest extremes of nonbeneficiality to evoke onboard adrenaline doses. Cheating on mates gets triple adrenaline if the participants pretend sex is evil, and that feature spills over into many otherwise wholesome parts of life, perhaps despoiling marriage bed relations, even if lethal or non-lethal VD is not involved.

I think the very severest consequences from the bad luck choice of surrendering to an addiction are not the commonly thought things like early death, etc., but conversely when something causes a person to never have lived, in some fundamental way. Any association, from certain clubs to religions which teach the young to get addicted to the idea that their people are fundamentally better than all others just for being members, are raising kids who will tend to not be thusly better. Those people who “have it made” or think they do, will usually not be driven to achieve and develop, so they will usually not achieve and develop. They are addicted to thinking they are better than others, and this specifically prevents them from being so. True, they will react to anyone usurping this superiority illusion with vigor and vengeance, and possibly commit capital crimes to shut someone up or “teach them a lesson”. Or possibly demonstrate enormous effort to support their delusion, which can often mimic some characteristics they claim to have developed, but any fair testing has to be quickly labeled as unfair. It is a close contest, whether to have never truly lived through addictive delusion of life, or to have lived badly through addictive delusion in life, is worse.

The sense of well-being from eating filling or sweet food is an addiction I constantly struggle with, as I have developed a number of economical good tasting dishes, easy to prepare in a hurry. Usually I only have my ideal 3 lbs of total body fat, but lately a particular sweet diversion has caused me to add on 2 more lbs. These two lbs overweight annoy the dickens out of me, but last week I was 3 lbs obese, and I cut back on the new challenge to my waistline at that time. It is working, and I can still indulge once per day and still lose a pound per day, if I go to bed a little bit hungry, which is my secret weapon. I call this winning, and by the weekend I can flirt with the occasional extra sweet. In this case I stalk the treats as much as they somehow stalk me! But my guile and strategic craftiness win.

Addendum. I had to stop keeping the new sweet around.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 30. What Were The Nazi’s Actually Like?

Most people are surprised to find out the Nazi’s were Socialists. Such people are usually equally surprised to learn Abe Lincoln was a Republican! It is easy to get suckered in by lore posing as fact, whether hunting for the truth or the deer.

The National Socialist Party of Germany, a.k.a. the Nazi Party, was a creation of the ancient Gnostic Axis Satanic Cult, which was at least some 8,000 years old and counting. As Satanists, they encourage lethal competition between all their chapters and divisions to keep the cult strong, and allow inter-chapter trade of weapons for use against non-members. Who we think of as the mob in its many forms, is but one branch of the Gnostic Axis Cult, also known as the Morph Cult some also call it, because it changes external appearance to penetrate anything anywhere. These are the same Gnostics which re-wrote the Jesus documents, substituting in standard Essene teachings and translating things into Greek and then back into Aramaic (with alterations) as though this “increased the intelligence“, and had taken over the Roman Empire, placing the Caesars in power. The same group by many names. Raw power, rooted in absolutely brutal evil, packaged seductively for human weaknesses to take it in.

To keep things tight, then and now they uphold several truly monstrous rules. As soon as “the low member” of a group is identified, they are disposed of some kind of way, as best fit’s the situation. So everyone is kept stirred up to avoid being so identified, keeping the cult active if not desperate! Anyone who knows about them, and refuses to join in the Satanism, is automatically considered a low member. (Be careful who knows you have read this).

One of the best ways to describe the Nazi’s, is the outrageously out-of-control impractical degree of “tax and spend” which is both their personality and policy. Grab and spend everything available for the Party’s party! Before someone else does, for their party. The Nazi passion for excess sets them apart from most other Gnostic chapters. The Gnostic Hebrews, formed during the Roman occupation, are probably the most conservative chapter of all the Gnostic Axis sub-groups today. The history of trouble in the settlements along the Rhine River is mostly of the Gnostic Aryans slugging it out with the Gnostic Hebrews. It went back and forth a lot, with both sides making a solid showing against the other. This is not most Aryans nor most Hebrews, but the Gnostic Axis Satanists posing and lurking among them, like they do with all groups everywhere, and doing a right good job of using them as both cover, a vehicle, and a life energy to suck off of, being purely parasitic and having no actual “life traditions” of their own! I expect trouble from the Anti-defamation League merely for mentioning the word “Hebrew”!

These two just mentioned artificial and parasitic Axis Cult opposites were attracted to each other right there at the Rhine, for the purpose of confrontation, which may mirror an evil version of the essence of other kinds of opposites attracting, and the complementary dynamics in such structures where fighting can be pleasurable, such as in sexual joust. Be that as it may, the neo-historic model of Jews being blameless victims of those crazy and vicious Nazi’s is only mostly true, if you know a few facts conveniently overlooked by such chroniclers as the Anti-defamation League, which has been known to suppresses facts for purely political reasons. Foreign Hebrew Bankers had naturally and fiscally correctly long been trying to edge out other investors in Germany, long before the local currency collapsed, both from the Great Depression and the huge reparations payments from WWI. At the height of it all, foreign Hebrew money mostly outbid everyone else, and much of what was purchasable in Germany was bought up at a handful of percent of actual value, by foreigners, Jewish or otherwise. Factories, newspaper companies, you-name-it, foreign Gnostic or non-Gnostic Jews suddenly seemed to own it, or so it appeared to a vocal number of German workers fired so that nice Jewish boys could be hired. Exactly how much of this hiring/employment abuse went on is anybody’s guess by now, but there was a lot of it at the worst period of unemployment ever seen in modern Germany. At this time, the ordinary German Jewish public made the biggest mistake in all of Hebrew history. Out of the historic clannishness with all Jews everywhere, which had raised Jews from a few thousand folks wondering what to do next, to 3% of world population and great wealth, well, they covered for the out-of-town Kikes. Big mistake. This created a wide exploitable margin, which the opposing Aryan Gnostic chapters came crashing down into with a huge Socialist boot heel! (Please create a parallel or nonparallel website or chatroom to fully tell your own side of this. Or just use the one provided. All I ask is that folks actually read whatever it is they comment on. Most angry letters to anyone else historically are begun well before even a second paragraph of whatever set them off is actually read.)

The National Socialist (Gnostic Axis Aryans) Party of Germany offered to seize all businesses “improperly” bought up during the time of national emergency, and nationalize them all for the public at large. Aryan issues were very handy, to blame and exclude the Jewish population from sharing in the booty, and to exclude the Gnostic Catholics as well while they were at it, wide tarbrushing all Jews, Catholics, and foreigners, for convenience and Satanic Sacrament. Remember, these were Satanists, sworn to lethal competition with all other Gnostic Satanist chapters, hidden in every group penetratable everywhere. It is imperative that this fact not be glossed over, as it is still going on everywhere in the world, at least to some extent. This includes churches, schools, police and other official power centers, clubs, business offices and work crews, social movements, activities, and by design anywhere the Gnostics can penetrate. Their main plan is to sabotage everything everywhere to weaken it enough to be thoroughly penetrated and controlled. The great flaw in this plan is that too many fleas and ticks kill the dog. The Satanic Sacrament of encouraging incidental and accidental inclusions in lethal curses upon helpless victims, fell upon all Jews, all Catholics, all foreigners, all Gypsies, all gays (despite the fact Adolph Hitler was gay), all intellectuals, well, you name a minority, they all went into the concentration camps to eventually die. Satanic Fascism is indeed equal opportunity!

Both over-regulation and under-regulation screw up a nice culture. Either way the neo-Nazi’s can get the system to weaken itself mostly through public dissatisfaction, from either the under-regulation chaos interfering with personal freedom, safety and flow of commerce, or the excess police function and over-regulation interfering with personal freedom, safety and the flow of commerce. If you missed it, let me point out that there is a classic bell curve response on public satisfaction, safety, and flow of commerce. Either too much, or too little, police and other regulatory functions are not a good idea, in terms of public satisfaction regarding personal realization of freedom, safety from predatory influences, and the maximized flow of commerce. The Axis screws things up any way it can to cause public dissatisfaction, and therefore weaken the seated government, from sabotaging war efforts to messing up the finer details of daily life any way reachable through any kind of civil mal-regulation.

Any functioning free society has an intact feedback loop in the system, to review results in a changing world. Things like free press, and secret ballot are essential to this feedback loop being intact and functioning to the public good. In this species of bad monkeys (generally speaking), we can enjoy the benefits of being better than we actually are, through careful application of Reviewed Representative Democracy, which is more powerful than our defects. This includes regulating the optimum amount of police and similar regulatory influences upon the public. This complex of regulatory functions being properly run with intact feedback loop in place and functioning properly, is the biggest thing the term “eternal vigilance” refers to. Recently certain people who should know better just attempted to get rid of secret ballots for some labor union functions nationwide. Personally, I was stunned by the news. The attempt passed the House of Representatives! Vigilance!

Over-regulation through police function is just as seductive to many, as too much freedom is to others, both of which cause reactionary anarchy losses, covert and overt, respectively. Everyone knows the 3 second amber light is too short for modern wide intersections, yet it remains as a source of revenue and oppression not appropriate in a free country, and a cause of unnecessary accidents as a Satanic Sacrament. It is shown that turning right at a stop correctly, moves traffic along nicely and off the crowded streets sooner, yet people are made to be stopped for no reason other than general oppression to weaken public support for the established ruling class, by planted Gnostic Axis operatives in the civil permanent government. The light systems are often made so you can’t get rid of the 3 second amber light, even if you want to! How is this not a conspiracy? The Satanist’s historic attempt to take over the number of the “Holy Trinity” is clearly seen, if you look for it.

By far the most common injury in auto collisions is the whiplash concussion, but since the head doesn’t hit anything to make externally visible signs, and it takes a week to settle in and become a disabling problem, has symptoms of low intelligence which mimic the natural condition of many sots, and is therefore difficult and expensive to diagnose; thus it is deeply under-reported in statistics. Also, the victims assume in a week or two it will be better, but discover too late it takes a year or more to recover, a serious matter indeed. The majority of auto collisions only result in a whiplash concussion for the occupant’s total injuries, but there are two factors almost completely overlooked, the non-reporting, and the fact a fastened seat belt more than triples the shaking of the brain inside the skull on vehicle impact. The statistics which resulted in the seatbelt law are therefore backward. You are overall about three times safer on regular city streets without the seat belt being fastened. On the highway, of course, seat belts ought to be required, because of the higher speed, and slightly higher safety in most collisions. But it is an extreme hazard and a violation of our right to privacy to require seat belts be fastened when not on the highway. The Gnostic Axis Cult operatives inside the civil permanent government know all this, and hope to make it a precedent that no one any longer has a right to privacy, part of the Fascist takeover. We must learn as an entire informed culture, to recognize these actions of the neo-Nazi Gnostic Axis Cult as they attempt to chip away at our successful free culture, as they slip saccharin chains upon us one link at a time. As quickly as these incursions on our free culture and way of life are identified, they need to be fixed, as the larger goal of these things is to infringe us backward into chains, as Gnostic Satanist Fascists will always try to get away with.

This crazy bunch of neo-Nazi goons are not generally known for intelligence, skill, leadership, or anything else uncommon in criminal genetics, as they are roughly defined as organized criminality. So there is relentless and studied, often forcible recruitment of those skills in an organized way, to add those genetic talent functions to the cult’s array of weapons and capabilities. So it is, that the smart, talented or otherwise gifted people seen among their joyful throng of pirates were purposely recruited, usually with several processings, over months or years, of a mixture of regular hypnotic technique and hypnotic drugs to near blackout, at the same time. They are very good at this, as witness their high success rate. The point right now is that association and support for the neo-Nazi Gnostic Axis cult various chapters, are not necessarily proof of criminal genetics, and it may well be the opposite in that type of case. Someday we will have to sort all this out. Primarily, the Axis recruitment is for rounding up all the available criminal genetics for footsoldier use. Anyone who shows criminality can expect to be offered “a deal they had best not refuse!” Such cheapness of life as they are about to have fall upon themselves has to be seen to be believed by polite company. Recruitment by bribe and terror, heavy on the terror.

Which brings up the major tool of the goons. Divide and terrorize. Modern authorities define “terror” as specifically only against large groups of people. Planted Axis operatives in law enforcement declare acts against individuals by organized crime as unreachable through being stratospheric in some way. Granted, gas weaponry from upwind is hard to track, especially the modified DNA-fragment stuff tuned for one specific person, or maybe an entire extended family. Who would have thought that modified gene-fragment therapy in a hydrated retrovirus carrier would prove to be such a devastating weapon? It is as easy to cause hiccups as to open up a hole in any body part internally, or any of hundreds of other symptoms often mimicking natural conditions, with that technology, and the hydrate gas penetrates normal walls and skin in less than one second. Granted, the cop has to live in this town after getting in the way of the mob, who will start by hitting his pets and family right in front of him. Only an informed public standing together can have any chance of holding back the neo-Nazis with their new gas weapons. One solution on the table is to eliminate the criminal genetics from the gene pool, which we don’t completely know how to do yet. Simply stopping conjugal visits prevents escape by route and device of genetic material, but that only goes so far in solving the problem.

Clearly some version of genetic shift for the human species, to exclude genuine criminal genetics, will remain on the table for some time to come. As hunters, we must be certain that the public’s view of us has it’s wholesome side clearly visible. Already, neo-Nazis want to disarm the public for the takeover, the way Hitler did to the German citizens, who never would have permitted the march on Poland, if they still had their hunting rifles and handguns. Hitler registered and then confiscated all weapons. Anyone in the way was declared a criminal. The same can happen slowly or quickly to all hunters everywhere, whether based upon our coincidental defensive capabilities, or just plain robustness! It must soon be chiseled in stone somewhere that robustness is not of itself criminal genetics. And it wouldn’t hurt to amend the constitution to spell out the right to privacy, while it is still possible. Bottom line: it is hunters who are the first and last hope of an enduring free society.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 31. Export.

Not that long ago, up until the early 1980‘s, all types of USA “export” were considered a very good thing. It was high quality manufactured goods, at a quality level unmatched for the price, anywhere, and exported American art of all kinds had nothing to apologize for.

And then American rock music took some fairly evil turns, and the USA began large scale exporting of evil brainwashing of the youth worldwide. It wasn’t long before visitors and immigrants from other countries were of a different sort than they had always been before. Instead of mostly wide-eyed hopeful nice folks, here for the opportunity to work hard and actually build a good life in the process, with a minority of the usual evil gouger types lurking at the fringes, that situation was suddenly exactly reversed. Swiftly, the majority of visitors and immigrants to the USA (often illegally) were now gouger-types, looking for richer victims, and the solid minority of good folks “legally and hopefully” coming in were as aghast at the change, as locals were. Polite people didn’t talk about it, at least not at first. Slowly, shock gave way to silent outrage.

Parallel to this situation, actually starting back in the late 1950’s, it became known that the children of illegal immigrants usually voted Democrat party. Certain party hacks swore to keep the Mexican border perforated, to help keep themselves in power. This began subsidation of criminals, of that extraction, along with whoever didn’t fit into conservative Spanish Culture, such as Mericons and Cavarones (homosexuals and satanist criminals).

Shortly after the Millennium, all that unrepentantly evil music “straight up targeting youth” with undiluted criminality, was excused from the public airwaves, since contributing to the delinquency of minors is patently illegal everywhere. But the damage was done. An atmosphere of gouging and grabs had deeply overtaken the USA. Formerly, public pressure had kept large domestic manufacturing companies from getting too much of their parts subcontracted to foreign factories using cheaper labor and materials, for final assembly in the USA, but that slowly gave way to the effect of the lower prices to the public from such practices. Resigned acceptance replaced the last of the clinging to the past. Many USA companies started moving entire factories for completed units to cheaper turf internationally. This would swallow more than half of American manufacturing jobs, and the lower prices would drive yet more companies to do the same. A rapid downward spiral was formed, transforming the USA into a bedroom community.

The Japanese model shows there is a curative effect for gouging foreign labor forces with low pay. They become well-trained and well-informed as to their options. Wages rise, as does quality of life, and the USA essentially has yet another new suburb, which will experience it‘s own factories moving to cheaper turf! So far, that unto itself looks good overall, with success and good living being contagious to other countries! Japanese goods are now no longer cheaper than anyone else’s, and the quality remains excellent. Good work is rewarded, quality of life is high, and recovery from gangster rock is observable incrementally, all the way to Mt. Fuji. In other countries, one obvious exception to this is child labor on simple textile products. The pubescent ceiling gets them fired as soon as they qualify for more money. Only the truly insensitized are not outraged at this. A few celebrities used to poke at it with a stick. Film at eleven cancelled.

But generally by now in the USA, the “gangster rock” has brainwashed the young, and many somewhat older, into believing that unworthiness, stupidity and piracy are a superior way of life. Such people cannot compete with normal folks worldwide in fair competitions, for health, jobs or place in the world. In sharp contrast with times gone by, what is left of domestic manufacturing actually sees both a shortage of qualified personnel, and those few modern qualified folks as often as not, have gangster rock-influenced bad attitudes and borderline criminality, with the traditional strong unions, and high wage demands, frequently independent of work and worker quality. Read this as low profits, and a lot of hassle. As the public has been increasingly bought off by temporarily low import prices, and ever-rising quality of foreign-manufactured goods, and “problems” with local products and manufacturing, the last of the pressure has eased from against USA companies who want the higher profits from exporting jobs. Well, there go the jobs! We can’t blame gangster rock anymore, because it is no longer on the radio. The USA is rapidly finalizing it’s existence as a “bedroom” and consumerist / tourism culture, with a little farming and manufacturing, not yet exported. There is no one to blame now but “ourselves” for clinging to the lower energies which were force-fed our culture by the leftist media. Not that rightists don’t also have a problem or two with the “review” part of proper Democracy. As cowpaths naturally develop from genuine needs and other practical factors, and therefore often eventually tend to become superhighways, my politics has always been middle-of- the-cowpath! The alternative to this seems to be merely choosing which chapter of neo-Nazis to put up with, which for me is a non-starter.

The new youth is slowly rebelling against the old youth, and slowly getting it together, albeit under a flag of veiled Satanism and modified criminality limited to pirating music and such, but the primary damage has been done. The world used to cower in fear at the USA nuclear arsenal, and cling to hope the USA would limit other countries from proliferation so the USA could remain the big dog, posing as a bastion of responsibility before the unwashed foreign hordes. The Iranian President cheerfully describes the USA bastion of responsibility in colorful terms, as they charge up their power reactors, over USA protest. Today’s USA world image is that of a country not that much more stable than those countries the USA tries to block from getting nuclear power, with limited success. Eventually, even coal-burning Japan will have to bite the nuclear bullet (again). It will be interesting to see how that works out! I expect a lot of hand-waving and desk-pounding, with Nippon quiet dignity, of course.

Under such scrutiny as has developed, Iran and North Korea will bluster for attention to get subsidies, but would never nuke anybody, for fear of similar reprisal very likely to “happen” first, and questions later. “Somebody Else’s Death for Peace“, and all that. The true value of the nuclear stockpiles is as carefully guarded nuclear fuel, being a country’s future energy wealth, after the oil and coal are too scarce (expensive). Funny how that worked out. We couldn’t have planned a better way to store it, from a guarding standpoint. Good luck is sometimes a bad dog that sleeps in the doorway. Did they ever find those 100 or so Russian suitcase nukes? I wish to power a small floating city with one.

There is a bright side to all this. Hunting. The USA has deer. Brown bears have been successfully reintroduced. The East has Marmots (groundhogs), and the west has elk. Fenced areas have stocked exotic game of many kinds, with no problems from most of the species. Except Eland. They are big, tough, and born troublemakers. When any animal problems developed, we have shown it was easy to simply hunt them out. Except Eland. It often takes exceptionally crafty and big-bore equipped hunters to take Eland, such as using a 375 JDJ. Water buffalo bear medical research into why they are so hard to kill, despite their mellow nature, to even cooperate with milking! This is different from Cape buffalo, which are huge and especially opinionated! (Don’t try to milk one.) Zebra are good for pelt, but taste terrible. Killing just for the pelt becomes an ethical issue.

Feral hogs have recently replaced deer in some areas (like places in California) as game of choice, as there is a manageable element of danger, and they taste good. Safari America! If we get behind it, the tourism money will be almost as good as the old auto plant, which moved to, where was that again? There is a corn field there now. Ethanol. The areas too rocky to grow the corn have solar cells to power the distillery. With vast usage of solar cells, the price of them dropped way down. Oh, excuse me, I was dreaming there for a moment, the oil cartel keeps the solar cell price inflated. We Americans won’t be switching to pulling carbon out of the air, by massively growing Maize-corn, as long as fossil fuel makes some people rich putting carbon into the air, to melt the polar ice caps. They say the Everglades will run salt water and switch to crocodiles, with a foot or so higher water. Other changes are bound to be even stranger. Swamps will be harder to drain for condos. Polar bears will require subsidy. Many other survivors of the end of the last Ice Age will fall to the Age of Freeways. I think it was Woody Guthrie, or was it Pete Seeger, my distant uncle, who once said, “Someday we’ll have nothing but freeways, and no place to go on ‘em”. This is actually a higher math concept, he is making fun of, continuing trends to their limits. Fortunately, we will need some areas set aside for other things, which will prevent the total takeover by freeways!

By clarification, regular eatin’ corn is vastly different from Maize-corn, often regionally referred to as Field corn, as though other types aren’t also grown in cornfields! The Maize is huge and starchy, not sweet at all, and animals love it. Stock gets fat on Field corn faster than any other feed, but it’s short on Lysine, for muscle growth, which is easily made up for with soy supplement, and whatever green feeds are cheap this week, for the vitamins, cellulose, and imponderables. Maize is hyper-productive per acre compared to other types of corn, and works great for Ethanol conversion, despite the fact yeast only eats sugar and ignores starch. Cooking converts the starch to sugars, which you would have to do with any type of corn anyway for Ethanol. When they speak of consuming the nation’s corn for ethanol production, that’s just typical distortions to keep prices up. As soon as there is a market carved out for more Maize production, currently unused lands will sprout it almost overnight. But there has to be deals worked out in back rooms to get governmental and mafia permission, high prices guaranteed, small operations bled half dry or locked out, powerbrokers bribed, existing markets protected, vendors specified, unions paid off, competitors sabotaged, multiple taxation rigged, and other negotiations we really don’t want to think about. But none of this should affect the regular eatin’ corn, despite scare tactics to justify raising gasoline prices because of reports of irresponsible use of the more expensive eatin‘ corn for some of the Ethanol production. Already the price of Ethanol is inflated because of artificial shortages. It costs less to make Ethanol in quantity properly managed, than to deliver gasoline by a good margin, but the crooks are all over this opportunity to gouge Americans who have more money than good sense, or interest in the truth, even when they are being robbed. Bottom line: The USA can swing into huge Maize production on currently unused lands, as soon as the right people are bribed. Local solar cell power can operate the distillery without siphoning power from other sources. In case you missed it, the corn, the Ethanol, and the electricity are all solar-powered, using energy currently wasted, and pull carbon directly from the air for free. Of the many carbon plans, this one appeals to me the most, even though we will be burning the carbon and putting it back into the air, using it and Hydrogen from groundwater as a storage device for solar energy. This also means all thusly Ethanol and biofuel vehicles are technically solar powered.

Global warming will hardly make very much more ocean, before the old “save the money” kicks in some kind of way. As soon as big money actually gets hit, big changes will also suddenly hit! I don’t know if floating cities are the next big thing, but ferro-cement barges do work, and the continental shelf is vast, and not too deep to anchor to with modern stainless steel cables. Floating cities of linked ferro-cement barges can probably withstand large swells if properly flexible linkages are developed. Individual barges certainly can, if bottom ballasted, covered, multi-sectioned (leak protection), and allowed to point into the wind. That nonsense about an upside-down ship ignores the fact ships are bottom ballasted to prevent that.

Saltwater-stable marine structures made of one or more layers of galvanized chicken wire inside ¾ inch cement with just enough Gypsum added to speed hardening as much as you feel is right for your process, are lighter than wood, in boats longer than a mere 30 feet. Plus, you can get creative to the max! If you run into a reef, you break the reef! Severe collisions which would have utterly destroyed other types of boat construction, often are repairable with mortar mix and more chicken wire. The galvanized kind lasts longer than steel or wooden hulls. I would use an inch thick, and 6 inch hollow beams, for whenever my friends reef-ram, by accident, of course!

Old ferro-cement barges make excellent artificial fish reefs, carefully placed so as to be just deep enough to dependably not get hit by shipping, or safely clear of well-marked shipping lanes. People are amazed at how much these artificial fish grottos greatly multiply local fish populations! No more over-fishing of the oceans this way, at least not those species which go for such structures, a factor controllable by location, design, and placement factors, which fish get affected. A case can even be made for custom-making ferro-cement fish grottos of thinner concrete and only one flimsy layer of galvanized aviary wire (smaller holes), of designs purely to boost fish populations. It works. Pilot projects are well-documented. Local fishing tourism money, with local commercial fish harvest trickledown, can pay for it all eventually. One tentacle washes the other! However, the oceans will have to be down to the classic 5% remaining of a resource before folks take notice, and it is typically 3% remaining before anything is actually done about it. The old 5 & 3.

However, those who will benefit, begin with fishy-smelling independent (not organized) people you never see, so good luck getting government to spend any money on fish grottos. Visible and organized people, clean, and well-represented in media and politics, are a much better bet, for exactly what, is yet to be established.

Free trade in all the eventually brought-up-to-speed worldwide suburbs of Lubbock, is a very worthy goal to hunt. Everybody wins! We can prevent anyone from completely losing, except those who insist on it. I won’t live to see such a world, except in my dreams, and possibly in yours. Export!

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors #32. New Life for the 43 Winter Special.

You remember my personal wildcat, the 43 Winter Special, or by it’s original name the 43 Rapid Chamber, which is true, but Winter Special is just as descriptive and a tad niftier. I was lamenting how it’s “44 Calibre” (.430” actual diameter) was sooner or later going to relegate itself to younger shooters than myself, and I was already setting things up for greatly reduced recoil in 25-35 Winchester, so I could somehow continue to hunt without getting stress cracks in my hands, someday.

Well, I was looking up some specs recently, when it occurred to me to check out the energy of the lightest load listed in the Hornady Reloading Manual, Fifth Edition, in 44 Magnum, just to see what was what. With the smallish Columbia Blacktail deer in mind, or Coues deer, or some similar smaller species, or a modest management Whitetail buck meat deer, or crop damage permit Whitetail doe, all requiring only a modest amount of penetration and killing power, I suddenly realized that the smallest bullet listed, the 180 grain HP-XTP at the 1200 fps minimum load shown, at 575 ft-lb energy at large calibre, was good enough at typical handgun ranges of 50 to 75 yards! This modest level of recoil I can handle, for years to come. And I don’t want or need a bigger deer than that, for my canned venison choice of processing, even though this amount of stomp is adequate for good hits on regular deer! And it can be in either any 44 Magnum or my own 43 Winter Special!

While not Earth-rocking to younger hirsute recoil addicts, this is very good news to any old duffer who thought big bore handgun hunting was over for them, with their trusty old S&W Model 29 which they haven’t dared shoot for the last decade or two, for fear of stress cracks in the bones of their hands! At 1200 feet per second (fps) and 180 grains in weight, that makes 575 ft-lbs of energy, at .430” bullet diameter before expansion. States which require 500 ft-lbs of energy minimum to handgun hunt big whitetail deer, will be happy that it happens at big bore caliber, and is used this way on modest-sized deer, by the most experienced hunters! Now, for much larger deer, one may need a heavier bullet for deeper penetration, but a larger deer is too heavy for a geriatric hunter to lift quarters of into the jeep! Need we mention a good scope on the pistol to improve sighting picture, for eyes which didn’t need one, half a century ago?

The 1200 fps gives +/- 3 inch trajectory out past 110 yards or so, which covers most woods hunting of deer, whether rifle or pistol. So far it all works out. The 44 Magnum gun described in the Hornady manual has a revolver design and a 7 ½ inch long barrel. I like the Blue Dot load of 11.2 grains of powder, because Blue Dot has always given me very consistent results and is extremely clean burning. But if your gun has a handy shorter barrel, higher loads are conveniently listed to get that chronographed velocity up to the 1200 fps needed. Or a bit more if your state requires 600 ft-lbs!

This much energy on a light bullet in a heavy handgun, wearing leather gloves, is not enough recoil to injure very many geriatric shooters. Of course, Calcium supplements, or milk in quantity, or even antacid tablets, all taken with Vitamin D to get the Calcium to sink in, all are an excellent preventative or curative measure for any shooter getting long in the tooth which is no longer there! Or any older shooter who hasn’t shot for a very long time, might “Calcium/D out” for a few months before working up back into the heavier loads, over many months, just like back when they were first starting out. Doing things right always makes a big difference!

I was hit with a surprise Calcium deficiency a while back, and I could even tell by the feel of my step, my bones were in trouble. Lots of Calcium and Vitamin D later, I am now a lot more solid than I had become, there for a while. I can feel a big difference, after 1 ½ years of Calcium / Vitamin D supplements later! I suspect a lot of us are in this same position, or headed for it. Most of us know someone who ought to be “reminded” of all this!

If a person switches to using a closed breech design pistol, like a Thompson / Center Contender or Encore model, there is not the bleeding off of pressure by a revolver’s flash gap where the cylinder doesn’t quite touch the forcing cone on the end of the barrel. So velocities, pressures and recoil all increase substantially, just by placement of the cartridge into a different design of gun. Hornady doesn’t mention any 180 grain loads in the 44 Magnum T/C section, nor anything anywhere near this low in power. They correctly assume anyone using T/C 44 Magnum equipment is probably going after game requiring a hoist or many people to load the carcass into, well, some bigger vehicle than a Jeep! Fine, and we’ll gladly take the pictures at our age and condition, of that hunt! No heavy lifting anymore!

If we use a downloaded T/C 44 Magnum for our geriatric purposes, a faster powder will download more stably than a slower one, and I say Unique gets the nod, for it’s proven stability in a variety of such demonstrated cases. Use Magnum primers to minimize powder position sensitivity as a variable. Using a chronograph and a younger friend or mechanical rest to hold the pistol at first, range-test to see what charge gets 1200 fps in your own gun. Then using this safe load, there is no longer any need for assistance. Get lots of practice at the standing two-handed hold, as walking around in the woods or arid country sage, is the easiest way to scare up close range shots at deer lain up for the day. Most deer will break cover when you are 40 yards away. Get some practice on cardboard targets at that distance, or with the 8 inch paper plate. Work on keeping elapsed time to under 3 seconds, and hope you have that much time in the field!

Or get a tree stand over a deer trail, and wear full camo, but this is not fair chase if you use a bench-type rest, according to some. A bench-type rested shot may as well be a rifle sniper shot, to many people’s way of thinking, as it is not fair chase in nature, according to them. Off shooting sticks, or a daypack? You decide. I’m not sayin‘, I’m just sayin’. Do make your own decision.

1200 fps on a .430” diameter bullet weighing 180 grains is about twice the killing power of typical 357 Magnum specs, according to many twirling chicken feet! If you discover in your own particular case, that 1200 fps in your particular weight of gun is no big deal on your hand, and a bit more power can be gotten away with, first consider several things:

(1). More power is not necessary on modest-sized deer, with good hits. More power to compensate for bad hits you would not have made at more reasonable power levels, might or might not help, and might abruptly end a geriatric hunting career, from hand bone (or arm / shoulder) stress cracks.

(2). On this 180 grain JHP bullet, 1300 fps gets 675 ft-lbs of energy, which is going to make messier kills, and is noticeably a hand-biter.

(3). 1400 fps gets 780 ft-lbs, which may well be both hyper-reliable and spectacular on modest deer, but this lighter low-recoiling bullet may have inadequate penetration on large deer, and definitely enough recoil at this higher power level to injure a lot of geriatric shooters. 1400 fps gets you +/- 3 inch trajectory out to 140 yards, which is as far away as the very best hunters can reliably place two-handed standing shots on an 8 inch paper plate, the size of a deer’s vitals, so 1400 fps is the most velocity an expert can actually use in this type of hunting. If one is not currently at professional hunter skill level, this power level is simply a waste and a hazard to geriatric hunters.

To quickly summarize this last maze of numbers, 1200 fps is all you need, more than that is both unnecessary and a hazard to older shooter’s Orthopedic health, in all likelihood. You may need 1226 fps in some states for 600 ft-lbs to legally hunt deer. Check local regs, and be careful, at any higher power levels. Don’t end those hunting days with a bang and a whimper. It is possible to do this thing safely, correctly, and legally all at the same time!

If you are lucky enough to own a genuine 43 Winter Special, all the foregoing applies concerning it’s use in a T/C Contender, or Encore model (for the heavier gun’s weight to help soak up recoil, not to load to African specs unless you are going there), for purist use with a 10 inch barrel. Younger stalwarts who want to use the longer barrels, 14 inches or longer, ought to do so in 444 Marlin, for possibly more power, albeit at lower pressures of 44,000 CUP. (The extra-big 444 case will have unstable ignition in a purist 10 inch barrel, producing vertical stringing). In either T/C model’s action, the 43 Winter Special cartridge can be downloaded to 1200 fps on our little 180 grain Hornady #44050 HP-XTP bullet, using a Large Rifle primer because of the big, originally a rifle case, and good old Unique powder. See what 7 grains does in your gun, chronographed, and work from there! (With the 30 to 44 calibre change, and not using a Nagant action, this is all legal.) If Unique doesn’t burn clean enough to suit you in this extremely downloaded situation, which might not seal the brass completely to the chamber walls and let some soot out, try either Bullseye for its super fast burning rate and quick peak to seal the brass, or Blue Dot for it’s midrange magnum suitability and exceptionally clean burning. A large rifle magnum primer may also help, if you have a loose chamber problem.

For general info, the 43 Winter Special has large size, a big rim, and good taper for Rapid Chambering with cold, numb fingers, without looking away from hit game. A straight case with no case taper (intended for revolvers) like the 44 Magnum, is likely to be fumbled and lost in deep snow, under these conditions (amid colorful language). The tapered 44-40 isn’t rated at even this much reduced pressure. The old high load (full capacity load of FFFF powder) 44-40’s were therefore throwaways, not likely suitable for reloading, leaded the rifle barrels if soft lead bullets intended for pistol use were used, and might experience case rupture in the first shooting! But at the time, they were considered worth it!

The 43 Winter Special is as big as you can get away with in a purist 10 inch long, .430” bore barrel, without getting unstable ignition. There is no shoulder at all to hang up even momentarily, however it is recommended that the gun’s chamber mouth edge be slightly rounded and polished to maximize Rapid Chambering, just enough to not be a sharp edge to gouge into the softer brass, possibly slowing chambering, right when split seconds and distractions add up!

Any T/C 44 Magnum barrel, Contender or Encore, can easily be re-chambered by a gunsmith to 43 Winter Special, and shortened to 10 inches if you so choose for purist use. Alternatively, a stock 12 inch barrel has two inches, if you need that much length, to devote to the best of muzzle brakes (use double hearing protection!) J.D. at SSK Industries.com, does amazingly precision gunsmith work, has developed some advanced designs of muzzle brakes, and has your heavy duty scope mount and improved T/C heavy duty latchwork as standard items. Every shooter needs the best trigger pull they can arrange for. See what J.D. thinks of yours. Be ready for the truth, as trigger jobs are one of his specialties. And one of mine, on my own stuff. Without a clean, crisp trigger pull, forget accuracy. It doesn’t matter how good the jar of ointment is, if there is a buzzard in it.

My 43 Winter Special is simply a 7.62X54R trimmed to 1.480” and deep-reamed .4275”. (It won’t work not reamed, as the modern manufacture high power wall brass, is too thick and irregular. You have to ream. Contact Forster for inexpensive reaming setups, and tell them exactly what you are up to, which usually means both the custom collet, and ream cutter. Caution, other trim lengths give the wrong mouth thickness. There is nothing to be gained by making the case be any longer. And you need the big rim for winter handling, so keep it. All those freezing Russians knew how big to make a cold weather rim! If you want a bigger case than this, fine. The existing 444 Marlin awaits your pleasure, just be sure to use a 14 inch or longer barrel, for stable ignition.

The 43 Winter Special was originally intended for use on deer only, at 750 to 800 ft-lbs energy, for controllability and comfort. However with full loads in a T/C Encore action, or another closed breech handgun action capable of holding 52,000 CUP or more pressure, using the heavier jacketed hardcast (Freedom Arms or homemade) or FMJ (silhouette?) bullets, it can take any land game on the planet, from a purist 10 inch barrel. Few cartridges can do that. Try WIN 296, H-110 or AA 1680 powder for this, and a good muzzle brake becomes mandatory, with double hearing protection. The 460 S&W and 500 S&W can take dangerous African game in a 10 inch barrel, whether you add an inch of muzzle brake, or cut it into the last inch of barrel (which is more effective), but neither has a Rapid Chambering profile, being straight cases intended for revolvers.

Another serendipitous accident in history! Everyone must decide for themselves what the last remaining frontier is. The 43 Winter Special may well prove to be the very best and safest equipment there is, for one type of purist hunt in the hottest terrain there is, against the most annoyed game there is!

Addendum: Make your own 300+ grain hardcast jacketed bullets by torch-melting Hornady #44280 JHP’s on a flat flameproof surface, and adding Silver solder up to a bit more than flat-nosed, mindful that it will shrink as it cools. Don’t overheat it. Influence the flux to result in soldering of the core to the jacket. Some folks will melt out all the lead, and use 100% Silver solder! This results in a little less weight, but Tip a Hat to the Lone Ranger! One can also buy these or similar from multiple sourses, perhaps made with non-lead Antimony solder, or whatever.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 33. Food.

The hunt for good processing of food is just as important as the hunt for food. I see this issue as coming in two shifts, what to do at camp, and what to do back at the ranch with access to stores. First, at camp, with what we brought, or should have.

I have heard many theories concerning meat tenderness and hanging. None of them hold my attention. I have cooked steaks right off the beast less than an hour after harvest, and they were as tender as any others. I have cooked steaks purposely taken from meat at the height of rigor mortis, and they were as tender as any others. I have let the meat get almost too high for me to want to eat it, and cooked that, and yes, that “French style” was a bit more tender, but the decrease in palatability wasn’t equally compensated for by slightly more tender steak, unless there is an acquired taste involved. Conclusion # 1, this ageing of steak is a mistake. I can just see someone telling a customer that old food is actually better than fresh! Clearly an obvious Scam! Test it yourself! Perhaps some guys wanted all the blood possible to be out of the meat, for some reason. You can’t get all the blood out.

On that wise, for my primary technique of quantity-processing of most wild meat, I have adopted the canning in jars of venison, usually just as soon as the sun is down so there won’t be very many, if any, flies. I take along when hunting, stashed in the truck, two 5 gallon cans of gasoline, for either headlight use or some other good 12 volt electric lighting, to work in all night. I always opt for the biggest 12 volt alternator which will fit on my engine, and additional deep cycle batteries in a diode-type splitter system, and/or knife switches for each deep cycle battery added. A 120 VAC generator, or horizontal small engine turning a belt-driven 12 volt automotive alternator usually with rheostat control instead of a regulator, is an option, but both are noisy. I take a good propane stove(s) setup adequate for as many pressure cookers as I can muster. I use either pints or quarts, depending on many specific factors which have emerged. But first, I must harvest an animal.

All the usual legalities and details are covered, or all is in vain to begin with. Then, I select an appropriate-sized beast. The young taste like rotted milk. The old are tough and stringy, and often too big for the number of jars I am willing to deal with. As soon as one such medium volunteer volunteers to present a broadside presentation, I center the lungs to avoid nicking any gut. If the beast jumps just as I am shooting, which has happened to me more than once, and a gut hit has to be dealt with, I put down the beast as quickly as possible, and hack the quarters off the torso before the gut juice gives the entire carcass a gamey taste, leaving the hide in place to keep dirt off the meat, and blood off my jacket.

I suspend the carcass head upward if at all possible, as lying flat is a hassle, and head downward is a disaster. One time I came upon a guy who had killed a deer recently, and had one of those store-bought coathanger-shaped outfits designed to hang both rear legs at the Achilles tendons spread wide for cleaning. I told him to do what he will, but throw that thing away or give it to an enemy, once he sees what happens with head down. The next time we met, he said he got even with some guy. Nuff ‘ said!

I use cord or twine to tie off both the esophagus, and the anal sphincter, then drop out all the offal (guts) as a single sanitary unit, directly into a tough plastic bag, still being careful to never nick any gut! At this point, the liver is available. The Shasta Indians called fresh-killed liver Run-all-day, I used to know how to pronounce it. Full of vitamins (and adrenaline from recent events), lightly sautéed with onion and served with ketchup and seasoned salt, I use McCormack’s. I feel that particular time is the high point of many hunts, aside from it being a much-needed break. I agree with the Indian’s name choice of the dish, and you need it to be up all night canning venison! One real serious caveat on trimming the liver. Absolutely avoid those green veins coming from the gall bladder. They contain bile, one drop of which will make any sot puke instantly! Cut a wide margin around those bile ducts, or risk ruining your evening with one bite of that liver.

A liver hit, or near liver hit, spreads bile throughout the liver. Better luck next time. Even the dog won’t eat it. Satisfy yourself with all that fabulous steak, of which you may snake out all the most prime cuts you can’t afford at the butcher’s, for your midnight feast!

The regular canning steak is cut into one inch chunks, and tossed into the clean jars up to about an inch from the top. Jostle the jar to settle things a bit, but never push down on any chunks, or they will pop back up on cooking and touch the lid, which can affect taste. Add a level tablespoon per pint of bacon renderings or salad oil, and a level teaspoon of season salt or sea salt. Make sure the rims are wiped very clean, at this point. Assemble the jars with very light torque on new lids. Put an inch of water in the bottom of the pressure cookers, and use the lowest jar platform to keep the jars just off the bottom. At high altitude, 65 minutes after the rocker starts rocking. Then let it cool down by itself slowly. If you try to hurry it up by pouring on cold water, you will boil all the gravy out of the jars and make a mess. All this takes a while, so you really do need multiple pressure cookers if you can swing it. Or just take your time, and maybe give away a front quarter, after a few days, when you see you won’t get to it soon enough, and it will get slimy.

Some of the jars just won’t seal, the tops go “kerpunk” when pressed lightly, and there might not be a reason visible why that was. You must make those jars your food supply, before they go bad. Dump the cooked meat into your regular covered stainless stew pot, for the twice daily simmering, so it won’t go bad. A can of tomato sauce added will make this situation half as critical in warm weather, by increasing acid content, and tomato Lycopene is a good antioxidant. Clean and recycle the jars immediately! If a jar fails a second time to seal, either tighten the lid a bit tighter to compensate for tweaky geometry, or use it for storing dry stuff, like the jerky. The lids come many in a pack for this reason. Get an extra box. They don’t go bad any time soon, and eventually you will use them up, glad you had extras so many times! Store the good vacuum-sealed jars in a cool place, out of the sun at all times. I try to leave the rings on them, as physical protection of the seal, unless I am short on rings. Buy jars in the fall from a hardware store, for the best price and availability.

Properly canned, I have had these things last past a decade, and still taste the same. I attribute this to having the jar rims be really clean, upon lid assembly, and just the right amount of modest torque on the jar rings before placement into the cooker. Do not extra-tighten the rims very much if at all after cooking. Too much tightening at any time squashes out the rubber gasket material, and screws up the seal.

The finished product is great for making sandwiches, or pass-around snacks when hunters meet in the off season. Cook up some vegetables and add a jar at the last 5 minutes, and season to taste, for surprise venison stew at special times or occasions! “No gamey taste” gets a lot of comments, and questions from people who may not believe it is venison, because it tastes so good. Tell them the whole story. Gut juice creates that awful gamey taste. A hint of sagebrush from some deer’s diet is not gamey taste. Sage is a legitimate spice!

If I can get it together, I try to have a little wire rack suspended over a few lit coals to throw on green nutwood (oak?) twigs, or imported fruitwood green twigs, for the smoke, and prepare some special jerky. (Make sure no creepo sprays your twigs with anything! If you discover they suddenly smell like pesticide, there are other twigs around). I marinate the strips cut from between the ribs, or strips cut from belly steak, in Ziploc bags, for half an hour or more, the kind without the plastic slider (leaks), and cook-smoke them on the wire rack. This is a good job for visitors, who get a percentage of the gross. Since this is wild game, and free-run stock is the same, there is a risk of parasites if the meat doesn’t get hot enough to kill them. Some folks feel that smoke alone is enough to kill any parasites, but I don’t want to risk it, in this modern litigious culture. If I had a favorite marinade recipe, I would gladly share it, but like my guitar work, I seldom do it the same way twice! Generally, any spices or condiment preparation with salt qualifies. I saw one hunter use salted water diluted straight mustard, the yellow kind, and I was surprised at how it actually tasted good! My marinade creations usually are based on ketchup and/or Tamari and/or seasoned salt and/or various spices. I try to store some of the finished jerky in the same bags it was marinated in, rinsed out a little, for extra zing!

Of course, gutting the deer ASAP in the wild, cooling it down right away inside a game bag to keep flies from laying eggs, bacteria, and “cooties“, and getting the carcass into town very soon (within a day) for processing and freezing commercially, is the option most people who realize good steak in the end, will use. The guys who leave the guts in for several days, until after they drive home proudly displaying the kill in the sun, I hope they get fulfillment out of doing it that way. And I hope no one tries to eat it. Someone with a big dog might benefit. Once it has gone bad, throwing it away is no longer wasting a game animal, according to law in most places. Or picture the soup kitchen which gets it in a donation. Do they boil the meat in several changes of water first? I don’t really want to know! The ketchup has never been made which can cover up that gamey of a taste.

By cooties, I mean mites. We are covered with mites, most of them actually beneficial, as they eat both dead skin cells, and also eat harmful mites which would eat our living skin, if not stopped. Flies carry mites of many kinds, some of which try to eat everything they touch, or emit an odor, and carry bacteria du jour. Yes, cooties actually exist! A friend of mine got infected with Odor mites, and was extremely rank all the way to her fingertips, until on my advice she soaked in a hyper-saturated (no more would dissolve) solution in a bathtub of laundry soda (Na2CO3) in warm water. Baking soda (NaHCO3) would have worked, but would have been more expensive, for the reduced Sodium content intended for food. Not only did that work, but her skin was velvety smooth!

She threw away all her clothes, and those she was wearing, and borrowed fresh ones to hit the thrift store, perhaps to get new mites, as well. Actually, I didn’t know if she could find laundry soda in a hurry, but I knew she could get all the baking soda she needed cheap and quickly, so I initially specified that. She used her knowledge of chemistry and shopping, to suggest laundry soda, to which I quickly agreed, it being what I had preferred for the job in the first place, saving at least 3 dollars! It seems she had used laundry soda as a mordant for dyeing of cloth sometime in the past, and knew where to buy it cheap. I feel that there is no such thing as “useless knowledge“ of anything modern or technical, not in today’s world! She had been cleaning apartments for money, without wearing rubber gloves. She bought them by the dozen after that! And kept a squeeze bottle originally intended for misting houseplants handy, filled with strong dilute bleach! I assume she never got mixed up and misted plants with it!

When I am cursed with city living for a while, I get some microwave-safe covered containers of the low and wide variety with good-fitting lids, and make high quality frozen meals in them. It doesn’t take that much longer to make ten than one, so I do a better job than I would have done on the one, enjoying the multiplication factor of bounty. The stuff is prepared the way I want it done, there is no disgruntled weirdo spitting in it or worse in a rat-infested rancid-surfaced cockroach-lined hell hole somewhere, marginal pieces are culled out, etc. The list of reasons to do it this way if one can, is as long as your reach into the freezer!

When the curse extends to my running out of Custom Frozen Feasts, and I’m in a hurry, I have noticed that canned stews and whatnot don’t contain egg. Egg doesn’t can well. But fresh egg cooked into canned stews, macaroni/meat, or whatever, adds vitamins, protein, good taste and a sense of accomplishment! I prefer to cook the egg(s) not quite hard, but past the indigestion of raw egg, which some folks equate with high class suffering. High class indigestion? It takes all kinds, I suppose. I add the finished mixture, seasoned to taste du jour, over whole wheat bread. Food this tasty can cause a person to overeat, it is as cheap as you can buy, as nutritious as most good foods and more than many, and quick to make in just one pot. Hide the empty cans in the recycle metals bins!

Whether in the woods or the city, I try to keep a covered 2 or 3 quart stainless pot with the equivalent of a package of stew meat in it. In the woods, bring it up to a simmer for 10 minutes twice a day, and it won’t go bad on you, even in warm weather, but try to keep it in a cool spot anyway. Some tomato helps, if you don’t mind being committed to cacciatore, which means in Italian, “in the style of the hunter”. Cooks take this to mean with tomato, herbs and mushrooms. But in the woods, some mushrooms can look just like storebought, but will cost you a liver transplant. Tomato and seasoned salt is plenty for me, anywhere! In the fridge, simmered a little while every couple of days is good enough to keep that fresh taste for a week, until a bit of rancidity in the unsaturated oils happens from oxidation of the double carbon bonds. Ask a kid with glasses what that means. These chunks of meat get a half hour simmer initially, stirred several times so it all gets browned, so they are cooked ok but not as tender as they will get very soon. Chop some up into scrambled eggs for a woodsy-style Mighty Hunter breakfast, before slugging it out on the freeway. Or add some to existing canned stew for a serious quick high impact camp-style meal, especially when spooned over some manly whole wheat bread, to reconnect with the warrior energies before that board meeting this morning! The best escape from wimpy foods, city or country, is to seize control over the situation with a Spartan Spoon!

Have you heard of a cold can? You pick a shady spot not too close to large tree roots, and dig (or blast) a hole just right to inlet a galvanized steel trash can (brand shiny new) up to near it’s neck, into the ground. Use loppers or a cheap hatchet to cut roots. Bell the hole a little, so you can fill in dirt around the sides to thermally lock the can to the underground temperature, usually 65 degrees F or less. Cover the lidded can with old blankets, cardboard, plywood, or whatever you can scare up for it. A fancy plywood low box with any of various types of construction insulation is certainly not cheating! While not as good as a Kenomatic Refrigifier, all food, flashlight batteries, film, or what-have-you can all live comfortably in the cold can. Paint the outside seams of the can with tar (roofing lap cement), for extra leakage protection, well beforehand. When the water runs out of the rodent holes this winter, you will be glad you sealed the cold can from leaks! Drive stakes into the ground to wire down the handles on the can, to keep it from bobbing up like Noah’s Ark! Equally important in bear country, wire the can lid down to the handles on the can, with bailing wire, or equivalent from the hardware store. If the bears still wipe you out, suspend a big bag with your food in it from a high tree branch with a rope, out far from the trunk where a tree-climbing bear can‘t reach it, and hope it’s not a smart bear. If they see you operate the rope, they will also. I prefer two ropes on the bag, between two trees. You only have to work one rope to gain access, if you work it right. Bears aren’t the very best jumpers.

Having gotten enough of arduous pack-ins of all supplies many hundreds of times over the years, I currently feel that driving to a camp is best, even if I have to create a passage here and there, for the truck. Those smaller one-handed gasoline-oil mix chainsaws are great for that. Don’t make a mess anywhere visible to Rangers. Pile all slash up against some existing bushes, so it looks natural from a distance, and adds to wildlife cover! From a truck-in camp, I can hike to wherever I wish to hunt from, or possibly drive some more in the wilderness on an ATV or low-speed geared, knobby tired motorcycle. Even in the wilderness, or especially so, use theft prevention techniques, beyond just taking the key. Use a hardened chain to immobilize the rear wheel, to prevent pull-towing by another bike, after they chainsaw the tree you chained up to! A cable lock on the front wheel to frame, will ensure it won’t grow legs. The creeps will steal and fence anything worth one hit of drugs, just for the Satanism. Which is about all they will get for most of your treasures. Don’t be cooperative, unless in a specific way, as part of a plan. We are hunters, after all.

Having machinery bring in the camp gear makes a huge difference in everything, mostly the cooking. If I have to make camp somewhere without either natural water or trucked in water, I am finally too old for that kind of situation for more than a couple of days, if that long. If there is ample water, at least I can drink my fill, and prepare dehydrated foods if game is uncooperative. When I make pasta (light in weight / dehydrated), I use only enough water for it all to be absorbed. This always gets howls from all those who have only watched cooking shows, and therefore know nothing about cooking! They complain that I didn’t throw away starch food and water. I ask why would any sane person purchase, transport, cook, and mix the food with often-transported water, just to throw it away? They say they saw someone else do that, so by definition that’s the way it is done, by that person! I tell them flatly take it or leave it, no food will be thrown away today! Then they notice the legendary al-dente pasta they always wanted to know how to make!

A half-gallon per day per person of water is the comfortable minimum, unless there is hot weather or cleaning of carcasses. I have certainly made do with less, enduring both. I could towel-wash my entire 6 foot 4 body with one cup of water, and wash the hair I used to have in a second cup of water, to please a dancing partner, that too when I was younger. With a tight-fitting lid and a slow fire, “nearly waterless” cookery becomes an intriguing art when water is short. The secret is to use a bit of vegetable oil on both the pan bottom and smeared on all food surfaces, to hold in natural juices. Use season salt “after” the cooking. Tastes are concentrated thusly, and another hunting memory is created, around the campfire. Good friends, good food, good times.

Regards.

OldHunterRumors.com. Cartridges. Guns. Hunting. Techniques.

OldHunterRumors # 34. Hunter/ Warrior Murmurings.

(1). There is a part two, to the part one, that one of the best things in material life is to drive your enemies before you, that you must then prepare a trap to ensnare your defeated enemies when they come seeking retribution, to get them twice, rather than allow them to use any victory celebrations as an avenue to their own victory, possibly of an infiltration nature.

(2). The best way to contain a defeated enemy is to entangle them in business such that they sell out their own anger. In time it will disappear, replaced with high visibility normalization, mostly.

(3). They who strike in anger, usually strike in haste, and often miss. This can be easily exploited by an opponent who is on top of things. Be that opponent. Inspire haste to create openings.

(4). Often allies will only act as allies after they see you are willing to act alone, and that without help you will likely resort to extreme measures to win, which may affect everyone.

(5). All 500 pound Gorillas look much smaller when they are in a peaceful mood.

(6). Most perception is the embodiment of desire for result.

(7). Much of self-image is the end product of backlash from fears, conquered or not.

(8). The biggest part of ambition is attachment to complex illusions usually involving power addictions, justified to varying degrees by material necessity, or social artforms.

(9). More than half the people will make their way in the world by mastering the “art” of surrender. This is not the way of the warrior, to manipulate hammers by being the best of nails.

(10). A true leader does not demand surrender from subordinates, and will prefer those who will fight by their side, over those who will surrender to their foot. A true leader serves those led, with tactics, coordination of efforts, logistical supply management, and definition of goals.

(11). The best way to begin a battle is to injure the opponent such that they cannot escape. From that moment on, most of their thoughts will be of escape which is no longer possible. Finish the job, as an unfinished nearly won battle usually eventually becomes a loss.

(12). One’s career as a warrior begins the moment one takes total personal responsibility for everything in one’s life, from all material things, to all transcendental things. A true warrior will not be willing to delegate such to others. This personal growth is permanent.

(13). A few people will make it their purpose to bring the various blessings of God into this world for the many, who will often make it their business to hijack, fragment, despoil, or make into some form of polished evil these blessings to parcel out and gouge everyone for remuneration. Anyone can become one of the former or the latter, and one must often choose. There is not much middle ground on this.

(14). The material world and the transcendental world are mutually exclusive. On every moment’s basis we must choose one or the other to be in. No life is complete without some of both. The often overlooked door to Heaven is to simply stop judging for a moment.